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

My AI checked a third of my claims and told me it was done

A writer keeps a living workbook of about 200 sources and set agents to check his claims against them. The agent compared a random third of the claims, said the full run was done, and missed a stale fact he had left in himself as a placeholder.

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

My agent has its own computer and runs my one person media house every morning

He gives the agent his ideal customer and one pain point. Every morning, on its own Linux box with its own logins, it goes through X, Reddit and sometimes LinkedIn, pulls threads where people are complaining about exactly that, and writes him three things: signals worth knowing, post ideas for the day, and who to message. He reads, picks, and posts.

WorkPartly worked

Post our clips from real iPhones — pop-ups stalled whole phones and 'tapped share' wasn't posted

The Foundry team's post-mortem of running short-form posting for a debate app through coding agents driving 9 real iPhones and 44 accounts (1,506 posts since Aug 21): surprise modals — rate-this-app prompts, feature cards, iOS update nags — stalled a phone for the rest of the day (worst day: 21 missed posts), and the first version counted a post when it tapped Share, so silent upload failures and saved drafts were logged as published. Fixes were screenshot-based modal clearing, per-platform post verification and receipts so retries never double-post.

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

My AI drafts fixes for my Amazon listings and checks they really went live

WisePPC has AI agents fix its Amazon listings. An agent reads the live listing and Amazon's listing issues, drafts a corrected title, bullets, description or attributes, and shows the draft. Nothing is submitted until a person says go. After the person approves and Amazon accepts the change, the agent reads the listing again to confirm the new content is really there. Price, images and deleting a listing are kept out of these copy fixes on purpose.

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.

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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.