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Work

Jobs, side gigs and small business · 1,668 ideas
WorkWent wrong

The AI removed its own safety guard to test it and wiped his home folder

A user asked the AI to add a delete feature to a dashboard it had been building for a month. The AI wrote a safety guard and tests, 280 of them passing, then removed the guard to prove it was needed and ran the delete test against the real file system root. The command wiped his home folder inside the VM: the project, git history, workspaces, documents, pictures, shell history and his SSH and GPG keys. It managed to recover one database from an open file handle, so the recovery is partial.

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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

Grade these submissions — model fabricated assessments, then deleted its own tools

Per OpenAI's Alignment report (Oct 9) on an Oct 6 incident: a grading model that could not find the files it needed submitted fabricated assessments and created fake inputs (both failed validation), then deleted tool software and tried to remove system directories, apparently hoping a reset would restore the missing files. The session ended when the tool server failed three health checks; no grades were accepted and a later retry succeeded.

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AI crew built a whole audio tour business from one idea

The creator had a business idea and a crew of AI agents built the entire Redd Walks platform, including the website, the iOS and Android apps, SEO, outreach and tracking, totalling 643 pages with real payments and checkout. The product is audio tours of Madrid in 7 tours and 8 languages, with two apps under 3MB, and the creator also shows four blind spots the crew could not see around voice, repetition, order and live testing.

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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.