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Work

Jobs, side gigs and small business · 1,669 ideas

AI agents now do most of the work on my ten open source projects

He maintains about ten repositories in his spare time, including work on Bootstrap, and the issue trackers grow faster than his evenings. Since October 3, 2026 a conductor AI session paces background agents that read and draft under written rules, and he gets one question at a time. On Bootstrap every open item is analyzed and a fix prepared when needed, and nothing is posted without a maintainer.

Small-town merchant built his own B2B point-of-sale app with AI

Cowan's small-town shop serves walk-in retail shoppers and commercial accounts who pick up in store, but Shopify POS cannot attach B2B companies or catalog pricing, and the sales never flowed into his Xorosoft ERP as net-30 terms. Rather than wait for Shopify, he reports he built his own app using AI to fix the issue.

Our costing sheets price a job in 8 seconds and caught a margin squeeze

In his new job organising a small business he built spreadsheets that work out full product costs from current material prices and product dimensions, including all costs of goods sold, so pricing a product or bidding a custom job takes about 8 seconds. Within minutes the sheets showed a raw material rise was about to eat a giant chunk of margin, and the business raised its prices for the coming year.

Turn construction plans into a priced remodel estimate in about 10 minutes

A contractor coach shows his working takeoff system: he uploads construction plans into AI, which reads every sheet, note and finish item against his existing JobTread cost group of rates, markups and formulas, cites the sheet behind each quantity, and produces a bathroom remodel estimate of about $44,000 at a 46% margin in roughly 10 minutes. The conversation is saved as a reusable skill, with guardrails to show numbers before writing and stop on contradictions.

WorkWent wrong

Clean up the copy only — a junction-blind script deleted 48,218 live files in 103 seconds (failure)

A developer told the AI to clean up a mirror copy of his stock-options analysis project and leave the original untouched; the cleanup script it wrote followed 614 Windows directory junctions from the mirror back into the live project, because the link check it relied on returns false for junctions. In 103 seconds it deleted 48,218 live files and emptied the .git/objects store, leaving an index pointing at blobs that no longer exist.

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

Family-office staff each built a working AI agent for their own recurring job

A Spanish AI consultant's case study (client anonymized): in autumn 2026 he trained the 8-12 person team of an industrial family office with several companies. Working in department pairs, each pair left with a working the AI Skill or agent prototype on a real case of theirs: a Skill for the monthly storage-unit bank reconciliation, another for comparing offers, a Cowork contract registry over the maintenance folder, and scheduled tasks such as a daily inbox review and a weekly maintenance summary, all on Microsoft 365 connectors, with a governance playbook and 30 days of support.

Put an AI check on patrol every 30 minutes against fraud-bot orders

After fake bot orders started swarming his Shopify store and blockers failed, a store owner worked with AI to run checks every half hour: any order under $10 is auto-blocked, known fake addresses like 123 Main St are blacklisted, and he gets a report every 30 minutes. The bots still try, but far less often.

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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.