Lost my job on Tuesday. Shipped a game about it by Wednesday.
His role was cut on Tuesday morning. By Wednesday breakfast he had built a 16-bit co-op game about the job hunt with AI and put it online for anyone to play.
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
Work
Jobs, side gigs and small business · 1,665 ideasA bookkeeping file sorter over 40 companies logs every move with a hash
He runs AI against real client bookkeeping, sorting thousands of PDFs into folders for about 40 companies. Before any file moves, the system writes a log line with the current path, the destination, a sha256 hash of the contents and the path to put it back. Nothing is deleted; files go to a dated quarantine folder, and a file can only be cleared when its hash already exists elsewhere.
Run my customer email overnight — agent sent erroneous emails to ~400 customers at 3am
A Hong Kong programming-society poster reports letting an autonomous agent operate unsupervised overnight; at 3am it mistakenly sent erroneous emails to approximately 400 customers. No human saw the messages before they landed — the failure was discovered from the agent's own activity, after the sends were already in customer inboxes.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
Edit my photos and videos through Kling and Higgsfield
Ekaterina Li reports that during her week with AI she connected it to the external tools Kling and Higgsfield and had it edit photos and videos for her. It was one of eight tasks she delegated end-to-end, from idea to execution.
$20
A weekly the AI audit found one store tracking every visitor with no consent banner
One of his scheduled the AI routines checks consent and tracking across four storefronts every week. It flagged one market at 0% of orders reaching Meta, and the cause was worse than a tracking bug: the consent banner had never rendered there, so the ad pixel fired on every visitor with no way to refuse.
Build a scan-to-wishlist lead capture that drove $60,000 in sales
At family retailer Bambi Baby, COO Josh Weiss, who is not a developer, used AI to build a scan-to-wishlist lead capture tool and its follow-up. Anthropic reported $60,000 in sales tied to the tool in its first four days and 18% of online revenue newly attributed to in-store visits two weeks into a two-store pilot.
$60,000
He had LLMs rewrite his Python science code in Rust and it now answers instantly
A man reimplemented his GIS science code from Python into Rust using LLMs, with a hard test: identical inputs and outputs at 10,000 points. Where the rewrite differed, the agent researched other implementations and tried again. The result runs 10 to 70 times faster with far less memory, and the service now does the work essentially instantly.
The AI learned my writing style from 50 past cover letters and writes new ones
He fed the AI more than 50 of his own tailored cover letters, plus his resumes and job descriptions, and the AI made a style guide for his writing. He then set it loose on new jobs, and the cover letters it wrote were acceptable, even if not quite how he would have written them.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Opus rebuilt a closed grid control from scratch: 500 files and thousands of tests
Opus 5.5 clean-room reimplemented a proprietary legacy grid control from observation of its public API, producing 500 source files, several thousand tests and pixel-comparison reports in a few hours, avoiding a licence over 1,000 dollars per developer per year.
$1,000a year
15 minutes with AI turned an unreadable XML dump into a tool I can reuse
His third party payment software has a poor UI and its routing rules came as an unfriendly XML dump. In about 15 minutes with AI he got a Python script that turns the export into a single HTML page where he can scroll the routes and click into each node for its priorities and matching criteria.
Every idea is a real post from someone who tried it, summarized in our words, with a link to the original. App names are swapped for plain words.