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Work

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

Decline a radio appearance that clashes with my schedule

Casey Newton's Dot, Kicker, handled a radio-show invitation that conflicted with his schedule, turning it down while he worked on other things. Newton estimated Kicker did about two hours of work in an afternoon for roughly 15 minutes of his effort.

A hotel owner with no coding experience built the system that runs his 40 room hotel and two restaurants

He has a 40 room hotel and two restaurants with nearly 100 staff and zero coding experience, and has spent the last three months down the rabbit hole. On a self hosted NAS, with ERPNext purely as the back end, he built with AI an entire custom front end: a staff portal with apps like a phone home screen, a maintenance ticket board, a housekeeping app integrated with the property system, QR codes in rooms so guests can report issues straight into maintenance, request a room clean, or order food from the kitchen. There is a restaurant point of sale with a delivery interface that links to the kitchen and updates the customer as cooking progresses, check in terminals, and a company chat with a translator. Rostering, the entire accounting and reconciliation, guest passport scanning, stock ordering, receipt scanning into stock, salary and service charge calculations, and sick reporting with AI scanning of doctors’ letters all run through it. Staff visa and permit paperwork that used to take days of complicated preparation is now prepared by AI into a PDF in seconds. About 140,000 lines of unique code, not counting ERPNext.

WorkPartly worked

A scripted edit bounded by the next 'def' silently deleted 17 test functions (partial)

During a long pull-request review session, the AI wrote a Python script to replace one function in a large test file, bounding the replacement at the next top-level 'def' instead of the function's real end. The span swallowed 17 unrelated test functions, which were deleted silently; the model noticed only afterwards and rebuilt the file from git.

This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.

She replaced her whole agent stack with nine AI bots doing real work

Claire Vo ran AI for several weeks and shut down every the AI she had. Her nine bots include Chief, which sweeps six inboxes and several Slack workspaces, a family bot that prints a kitchen table newspaper for her kids each morning, a helpdesk bot getting five star reviews, and a bot that audits subscriptions and negotiates insurance.

Run my whole company on scheduled agent shifts

A digital-health CEO reports his businesses have no full-time developers, DevOps, designers, analysts or product manager: scheduled AI agent shifts handle deploys, an agent-built CRM, per-business-line email sorting, meeting scheduling, technical support and publishing news four times a day. The work runs on three $200 AI subscriptions — $600 a month against roughly $38,500 a month at US median pay for the replaced roles.

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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.