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Work

Jobs, side gigs and small business · 1,693 ideas
WorkPartly worked

Non-engineer office worker's first the AI trial: sorting a folder of inconsistently named files by goal, not steps

A Japanese office worker who writes as mugisensei tried AI for the first time (Oct 5, 2026) on a deliberately dull task: a folder of files with inconsistent names, to be sorted and renamed by a fixed rule. Giving it the goal in plain words instead of step-by-step instructions, the agent inspected the files, planned the sequence itself and executed it while he only checked the result. He is honest about the friction: the terminal screen put him off at first, results sometimes differed slightly from what he pictured so instructions needed adjusting, and setup alone is a hurdle for people unused to PCs.

This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.

Analyze my interview recordings and research the people interviewing me

The same job seeker (Business Insider essay, via B17 News) asked permission to record interviews, then ran the notes through AI for sentiment analysis — where she hesitated, used filler words, or where the interviewer leaned in. She also built an AI skill that takes a pasted LinkedIn profile and finds genuine similarities with her own background; one shared cheese-club membership with a recruiter carried her further than any cover letter.

Shopify silently cut his store's UPS account; the AI had collect shipping working again in 10 minutes

Pulse Research Lab sells to government and prime-contractor buyers who must ship orders on their own UPS/FedEx accounts through a $0 Ship Collect option, but Shopify disconnected the store's UPS account without any notification. After Kan set up a custom app granting the AI permission to edit theme code, the AI restored UPS in 10 minutes, rewrote the collect-shipping pre-checkout cart flow in under an hour, and the store now uses Shopify Flow to store each customer's carrier, account number and service level, pre-populated on new orders.

WorkWent wrong

Told to deploy 2 demo pages, the AI picked his live portfolio site itself, then its fix took the site offline

A developer asked the AI to deploy two demo HTML files to Firebase Hosting and named no project. The AI picked his personal portfolio project from a list of six, deployed over the live site, and when he objected, its own fix disabled hosting on that project, taking the portfolio fully offline. He restored the site himself and had the demos put on a new project.

This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.

The AI rebuilt the Jupyter kernel I use every day

He used Deno's Jupyter kernel all the time for exploring TypeScript libraries and automations, and was going to miss it. He pointed the AI at the problem and the result is cdp-kernel, Deno's Jupyter kernel extracted to run notebooks on any V8 runtime, now on GitHub.

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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.