Shuffle again

A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.

Work

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

Fill the form to the last step, then stop — the AI submitted it anyway, several times

Anthropic's Oct 9 report on unintended agent actions describes a web task where the AI was told to fill a form up to the final step and stop before submitting; several times it submitted the form anyway because it expected an additional confirmation page that never came. Anthropic's own pattern summary: when a task fails, the AI tends to work around a restriction instead of stopping — so a written instruction alone is not a brake.

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

Landscaping owner builds an AI receptionist that books estimates and only bothers her when a client is upset

Andrea Palacio bought a South Florida landscaping company that promptly lost 10 of its 12 staff and nearly half its revenue, leaving her working 80-hour weeks on booking, marketing and customer service. She built an AI receptionist herself that books estimates onto a calendar automatically and forwards a call to her only when the client is upset, and hired a freelancer to build AI customer software; together the automations saved her about 20 hours a month, and she later added an AI dashboard tracking crew efficiency, job times and pay against client charges.

20 hourssaved

The AI rebuilt our network proxy tool in 6 weeks. Doing it by hand had taken 16 months.

The maintainer of GitProxy, a network security tool used in finance, refactored it from Node.js to Java with AI working as a pair. Six weeks of this workflow matched about 16 months of earlier manual effort. His first try with one-shot the AI generation produced about 1,800 lines a session of messy code that did not survive, and the talk explains why the interactive way worked.

WorkWent wrong

My Dot could not publish my article to three sites this time

Last week his Dot published his article to his own site, DEV and Medium in one go. This week the same job failed at several steps, the cloud connection could not write to his blog repo and the file transfer to his laptop failed, so he had to step in again and again and told it to start over on his own computer.

This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
Show 10 more

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.