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Jobs, side gigs and small business · 1,665 ideas

For six weeks an AI operated Cadence Virtuoso for him and designed three analog circuit blocks

Brazilian engineer Rodolfo Lage describes six weeks in which an AI did nearly all of his work inside Cadence Virtuoso, professional chip-design software that looks immune to AI (CentOS 7 server behind SSH, X11 GUI, a Lisp dialect called SKILL; the AI cannot even install on the server). Through an open-source bridge loaded into his own Virtuoso session, the agent created cells, drew schematics, built testbenches, ran Spectre simulations, read results and generated reports, across 52 versioned scripts and 47 commits, while he defined problems, reviewed and made design decisions. Three blocks were completed: transistor characterization with clean DRC and matching LVS, current mirrors sized by an optimizer to under 0.005% current error, and a common-source amplifier reaching 26.8 V/V gain and 109 MHz gain-bandwidth. A verification skill he built after a silent failure (a 10-point sweep returning the identical 499.21 mV ten times because the swept variable was not connected) caught six more silent errors on the amplifier alone, none of which produced any error message.

Build client-facing divorce tools with AI instead of spreadsheets

Family-law trainer Stephen Smith built four working tools with AI, one conversation each: a settlement schedule that shows a client how much of an $8,000,000 award is actually spendable and when, a two-sided case chronology with exhibit links, a parenting-time calculator that counts overnights and percentages, and a case-path timeline clients get at the first meeting. The examples use training data, and he warns that the AI wrote the math, so every number must be checked before a client relies on it.

Jobsite QR codes let any worker ask the specs, and an agent audits submittals for the PMs

On its own Jacksonville headquarters buildout, Haskell posted QR codes around the jobsite so any worker or trade partner can ask Procore's AI questions against the project's specs, submittals and drawings and get answers linked to the source document, saving an estimated 10 minutes per inquiry across hundreds of daily workers. Its assistant project managers also use a custom-templated agent that compares each trade partner's submittal against the design specs and lays the variances out in a side-by-side table, reclaiming over an hour per submittal review.

1 hoursaved

One person runs an online game key store with about a dozen AI sessions

A solo founder runs his game key store with about a dozen AI sessions, one each for code, pricing, copy, bookkeeping and suppliers. They stay in sync through a shared record where facts are only ever added, each fact says whether a session confirmed it or just read it somewhere, and his decisions go into a numbered ledger the sessions look up instead of asking him again.

Build a native job-tracker app with AI writing all the code

Andy Bennett built Helm, a Mac, iPhone and iPad job tracker with CV tailoring, with AI writing all of the code and most of the design across 641 commits and 21 plans. The first working Mac version landed in about eight hours of commits on September 11; both apps are now in TestFlight beta.

WorkWent wrong

I sent an AI to hunt open source bounties for three days. It earned $0.

He gave an AI one job: earn a first real payment from an open source bounty. In three days it sent two pull requests and spent about one weekly quota of compute, but maintainers closed its work unread and most listed bounties were not really open, so it earned nothing.

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