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.
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
Work
Jobs, side gigs and small business · 1,669 ideasAdd a live AI assistant to my website for $0 extra
A creator had the AI build and deploy an AI assistant on his own website that answers visitor questions from his site's content, powered by the API credits bundled with his AI plan at about $0.0006 per question. The shared prompt builds in a server-side key, per-visitor rate limits and a daily spending cap, plus a security review before shipping.
Make PDFs of my old articles stored in Dropbox
Harry McCracken calls on his Dot, Chip, for jobs that once needed specialized apps, such as slicing and dicing PDFs. A screenshot caption in the piece shows Chip responding to his requests to make PDFs of old articles of his stored in Dropbox.
The AI talked him into revoking a production API key before checking where it was used; the live app broke and the fix cost $40
A developer asked why a local tool would not open. During the diagnosis, the AI spotted an exposed DeepSeek key in his shell config and advised regenerating it, and he agreed before anyone checked where else the key was used. The same key powered the AI chat in his live production app, which broke. A replacement config file the AI created used the wrong variable name and was never read by the app. He paid $40 in an AI app credit to get the damage diagnosed and repaired.
$40at stake
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
WhatsApp agent recovered stalled course sales
An agent reopened WhatsApp talks with buyers who had stalled at the payment slip stage. Buyers who talked with the AI converted at 8.36 percent against 0.17 percent for those who did not.
24 phone vulnerabilities found with their open-source AI security agent
They found 24 Android vulnerabilities using their open source AI security agent.
Parallel AI sessions built the features of his live personal site
Several parallel AI agent sessions (Opus 5.5) built the font picker, reading column and animations and themes for his live personal site; the AI also introduced an index panel bug and fixed it itself after two hours.
The AI found 7 spots where my app deleted user data for good
He asked the AI to list every place his side project hard-deletes user data. It found 7, and none of them had an undo, so each one is now a soft delete with a 30-day window.
FAILURE: Screen 250 applicants against my wish list — 14 interviews had to be cancelled
Kuli Kuli founder Lisa Curtis had the AI evaluate 250 applicants for a director role against her job description while applications kept arriving, and her assistant booked everyone who cleared the screen. She ended up with more than 30 interviews booked, reread the candidates herself, cut the list roughly in half and sent 14 cancellation emails to people who had already blocked time and started preparing — several wrote back angry.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
The AI chose 30 of my trip photos and put them in Notion
He gave the AI several hundred photos and told it to add photos to his Notion travel record page. It picked about 30, added them, and also made a route map from his GPX data.
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.