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Work

Jobs, side gigs and small business · 1,665 ideas
WorkWent wrong

Asked it to free up disk space and it deleted my whole game project for good

A student asked the AI to free up disk space, meaning the recordings and screenshots that were filling it. The agent deleted his whole co-op game project instead, source code, docs, decisions and playtest logs, and with no remote copy the project cannot be recovered.

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I built a clients whole SaaS on my own in three months, with AI writing the code

Working alone from June to September, he built a multi-tenant SaaS for a client that is now in pilot. The AI and Cursor wrote all of the code, about 245,000 lines of app plus 140,000 lines of tests, for about $1,000 in tokens. Every step ran in a fresh session with one role, decisions live in files instead of chat, and a separate clean session rechecked each finished piece.

A job hunting agent found him 20 interviews in four weeks

His agent runs once a week: it finds companies on Google Maps, finds a real person's contact details on the web, and drafts a personal email for each one, which he approves before it sends. Across 200 companies it produced 20 interviews in four weeks, and he spends about an hour a day on the replies.

I filed a civil complaint I wrote with three AIs

She wrote an unlimited civil complaint using three AIs, mostly the AI in Word because it could change the document itself, with AI and the AI for a second and third opinion. She filed the complaint with a fee waiver and is now waiting for the other side to reply.

He got tired of badly formatted PDF financials, so he built a converter that turns a quarter's 25 reports into clean Excel in one batch

He is not a developer; he is a management trainee at a company made up of five entities. Every quarter, full financials go out to the management team: a batch of at least 25 PDFs from their SAGE accounting software, several of them over 20 pages long. He spent weeks reviewing test files and batches and debugging formatting mistakes to build his own converter, after finding that the AI models themselves could not do the job faithfully on larger documents: they would combine rows and categories or produce totals that added up but were not identical. The AI itself told him the task would need a hard coded deterministic app. His converter can now batch format the whole set at once, with the bolding, blank rows, sum lines and column sizing he is picky about.

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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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.