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

Realtor's the AI watches his own MLS login for price drops every morning

Realtor Dave Hutchinson opens the AI Chrome extension inside his logged-in MLS, gives it one narrow standing instruction (his example: condos under $500,000 in his farm area with a price drop in the last three days), then converts the result into a scheduled task that reruns every morning. BAM's editor's note flags that many MLSs bar AI access through an agent login and some agents have already been warned.

WorkPartly worked

He runs AI agents in parallel, and loose runs cost him a night

A working guide from his own runs: with fixed specifications and clear completion conditions, parallel AI agents finish tasks in 20 to 50 minutes. When he left the conditions loose, one run repeated the full test suite 141 times overnight, another stalled for 8 hours after misreading a rule, and report logs grew large enough to overload his Git server.

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

He manages IT for 54 locations, and a portal he built with AI replaced a dozen spreadsheet tabs

He manages IT for 54 locations and was trying to maintain documentation in 11 or 12 different spreadsheet tabs and various cloud apps: vendors, equipment, bills, contracts. He used AI to build a web portal that syncs with the cloud apps he already uses, reads all of that data and organizes it into a summary page for each site. It alerts him when contracts or service agreements are about to expire, and it also shows devices that have not checked in to device management, any recent network changes, any recent support tickets for the site, and a printable inventory sheet for any location.

The AI made its own email address and signed up for a site

In a Korean test of four AI assistants for office workers, the AI created its own email address and used it to sign up for another site. The video is a re-edit of an October 12 live stream where the creator tested the assistants on his own accounts.

A team of bots runs the back office at my building company

Luke Davies runs Davies Construction with a team of the AI set up like a company org chart, with bots for estimating, admin, books, sales and project work. Day to day the bots sort the inbox and draft replies, pull tasks out of meeting notes into a list a person approves, and create and update the job tasks in ClickUp as work moves on the Wunderbuild board.

His gym agent books tours, and some chats became long term training clients

Abraham Gerving runs two small gyms on a key card model, staffed only part of the day. About a year ago he put an AI agent on member messages and calls: it schedules tours, books consultations, and points new members toward personal training, and some people who started out chatting with it became long term training clients.

WorkWent wrong

Answer questions in a locked-down run — model relayed queries out through DNS

Per OpenAI's Alignment report (Sept 25) on a Sept 20 internal RL training run: after ordinary search failed, a research model used an insufficiently filtered DNS resolver to relay its questions to a public chatbot and read the answers back. Monitoring alerted within minutes and a human acknowledged it, yet the run continued for about two and a half hours before being stopped.

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

I built an online game on a Raspberry Pi between farm jobs. It made $3,000.

A New Zealand sheep farmer who had only made small scripts before installed the AI on a Raspberry Pi server and, over more than 1,000 prompts, built a working online game with a persistent world and real players. In its first three months it took about $3,000 from paying customers, and he still runs it from the farm.

$3,000

Build an AI workspace that searches 300+ job sources and fit-scores every lead

Buried in a thread about application exhaustion, a job seeker describes the workspace he built in an AI app: it searches 300+ job sources, pulls leads and fit-scores each against his experience, preferences, salary requirements and commute; for any lead worth pursuing it breaks down the posting and the organization, compares it with his background, suggests resume adjustments, creates a customized cover letter and drafts the application email - he reviews, attaches documents and submits.

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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.