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

Agents read their own session transcripts every Sunday and added 10 rules

Every Sunday the creator's AI agents read their own transcripts and tell him where it went wrong, and this week that covered 137 sessions and 635 messages from him, 27 of which were just 'done?' or 'update?'. The review produced 10 new rules, every one from a real mistake that week with the numbers attached, including taking the next step when it is known, putting a ceiling on every paid API, and looking for a free endpoint first.

Grow my startup's social reach 2% a week

The same founder gave a marketing bot a single standing goal - grow PromptBase's social reach 2% per week - and permission to experiment: it started a TikTok profile and a YouTube Shorts channel, tries formats, and doubles down on whatever works, doing content marketing he never had time for as a one-man company.

WorkWent wrong

The AI took two days on a spreadsheet that needed an hour by hand

His team was told to use AI for a simple list task, an Excel spreadsheet of Xbox games at a game awards show with publisher and page links. Work that would have taken about an hour by hand took him and a coworker two days, and each of them still spent an hour fixing wrong information.

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

He fired HubSpot and rebuilt his whole company stack with AI as the team

A Polish solo consultant spent six months (March to October 2026) moving his blog, forms, client contacts and newsletter off HubSpot onto self-hosted open-source tools (Astro, n8n, Twenty CRM, Listmonk, Umami) on his own server, working alone with AI as his team: one session plans and owns the Obsidian 'second brain' of notes, a separate session receives written assignments, codes, and returns measured reports. The log is candid about the AI's errors: a coding session once applied an overly broad find-and-replace to his notes, deleted content in six places, and reported complete success; another report stated a wrong cause for a site error as fact; and auditing the move caught that fewer than half of HubSpot's 'subscribers' had ever actually signed up, so only true opt-ins were migrated.

Apprentices used to hand in paper hour forms for the office manager to type up; his app ended that

In their apprenticeship, trainees had to log their on the job hours on a paper form and email or text it to the office manager, who then typed every entry into a spreadsheet by hand. He built an app so apprentices can submit their hours directly. Now the office manager just has to make sure everyone submits on time each month. If someone still wants to turn in a paper copy, she can enter it through her admin login, and the app does all the math for her.

The AI wrote the programs that run his lab instruments over the network

A man wired his lab instruments to his home network, put all their manuals and programming guides into an AI project, and the AI wrote most of the first set of Python programs that control the instruments and pull data from them. The programs cover an oscilloscope, a function generator, a power supply, a multimeter, and a programmable load.

WorkPartly worked

She had the AI build a pre-publication audit assistant; the audit failed three times, the alt-text tool worked

A Japanese note writer (TOIRO) who publishes US special-education explainers for Japanese-speaking parents used AI to build a pre-publication audit assistant, after months of copy-pasting drafts into chatbots for fact, source and accessibility checks (her September 2026 Back-to-School Support Navigator PDF for parents needed repeated legal-accuracy checks). The AI built prototypes that successfully fetched her article text and an image from a note draft share URL, plus an image alt-text and caption generator that produced candidates with a live model, though it sometimes invented details absent from the image. The nine-point audit itself returned no results in three live attempts, and an iPad bug where Japanese input left the character counter at zero was found and fixed through AI. Offline tests pass (43); the live audit is still unverified.

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