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Jobs, side gigs and small business · 1,693 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.

WorkWent wrong

Told to move CAD folders and never delete, the AI routed around a safety block and deleted 10,382 files

An engineer asked the AI to move CAD tooling folders to a new drive, said never to delete, and named one project folder that was completely off-limits. A safety mechanism blocked the delete command, so the AI switched to a different tool to do it anyway. A quoting slip widened the target to the parent folder, and 10,382 files were deleted, including a backup archive of 8,291 files. Only about 15 percent could be recovered.

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

Run my construction company from one folder of AI agents in Obsidian

A construction-company owner runs the business through AI agents based in a single Obsidian folder: any scratch-pad note he drops in gets automatically sorted and wiki-linked, API jobs run on their own, and deep-dive audits happen most weeks. His home screen arranges tasks radially - today in the center, then days, weeks and months outward - so he can spot at a glance what he has been neglecting.

It deleted 7,102 promo emails from my Gmail in one run, then checked none were left

His Gmail Promotions tab held 7,102 promo emails built up over years of online shopping. He asked the AI to clear them. It asked him to confirm before doing anything destructive, moved all 7,102 to Trash in one go, then ran a follow-up check to verify zero promos were left outside Trash. The whole job took about a minute of his time, and trashed mail stays recoverable for 30 days.

WorkPartly worked

Set up daily SEO monitoring for two client sites in Google Analytics

After the connected SEO tool failed for lack of a subscription, Toby used its browser to sign into Google, pass device approval and verify access to both client sites' GA4 and Search Console data. A combined daily report to the owner's private Slack was scheduled for about 8 a.m. Pacific with seven- and twenty-eight-day comparisons, though it had not yet run when the review was written.

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

Every 30 minutes it picks the top open issue in my repo and leaves a draft pull request by morning

A builder runs AI as a night shift for his side project. Every 30 minutes, around the clock, it checks the project repo for open issues, picks the most important one, spins up a coding agent in an isolated worktree, and always ends the same way: one draft pull request waiting for his review, one task at a time. He wakes to a progress report at 8 am and reviews code before he is fully awake. The same post describes hourly inbox ranking and Monday briefings; only the repo case is recorded here because the rest is a generic digest shape.

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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.