An LLM wrote data library bindings for his language, perfectly sufficient first try
Asked an LLM to write Apache Arrow bindings for Lean; it knocked out perfectly sufficient bindings.
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
Work
Jobs, side gigs and small business · 1,665 ideasThe AI resurfaced lapsed founder relationships from a year of Gmail
The author asked the AI to scan his Gmail for founders he had spoken with a year earlier but not recently; the AI surfaced several not contacted since last fall, and he is now reviewing their companies for follow-up.
A headless agent works his ticket queue: compares code to tickets, replies on its own
Set up headless the AI on a VM with an Azure DevOps MCP queue; it compares code to tickets and replies to comments automatically.
Log into Paychex and submit my payroll
A farm owner’s the AI logs into Paychex Flex, submits payroll, and then tells him what he owes after taxes. Payroll day is a bot run and a summary, not an afternoon in a portal.
I used AI to fix a data entry gap at work
A man with no coding experience used AI to generate a VBA script in Excel. The script fixed a manual data entry gap at his work and took the risk of typos and misreads out of the job.
An agent without proper guardrails refunded $8,000 of his orders
An agent he had not yet set up with proper governance or skills refunded $8,000 of orders. It did ask 'You sure?' before acting, but he blanked on the confirmation and approved it. He puts the fault on his own setup more than on the agent.
$8,000one time
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
My agent rebuilt my business website and runs its search work weekly
The same side business owner had the AI redo his website and take over its search work. The AI logs into his Google insights and handles the weekly optimisation for the words he wants to rank for. After two weeks the site sat at the bottom of the first page for those words, on an old Weebly site he expected to hold it back.
Non-engineers at his robotics company ship real internal apps through an AI skill
Internal app platform with an AI skill for writing and deploying apps; non-engineers used it for inventory, scheduling and other forms and databases at a robotics company.
My agent rebuilt the business software I was paying $150 a month for and saves me $1,750 a year
Answering a how are you making money thread, he says a piece of business software he used does one thing and does it badly. With the AI’s help he built a piece of software that does the same thing better, with the features he always wanted. It took a lot of bug testing and had many errors at first, but it was done in two weeks. His version costs him $50 a year in server costs instead of $150 a month, saving about $1,750 a year.
$1,750a year
Sold two the AI-built websites to local businesses after ~50 cold pitches; the
Someone cold-pitched ~50 local businesses with websites the AI built; 2 bought. The website-flipping idea came from the AI itself; he just made the calls.
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.