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

Five years of books rebuilt from 34,000 transactions across 27 statement formats

He spent 31 years in IT, retired, and now runs an auto repair business. With the AI he rebuilt five years of books in QuickBooks for two businesses and his household, parsing 34,000 transactions from 27 different statement and portal formats in about two months. Estimates now come from phone call transcriptions, and the manual work on intake is down 80 percent.

WorkWent wrong

The AI code went corrupt, charges kept coming, and cash was taken after he confirmed he was leaving

After about three months building code on the AI, the reviewer found the code corrupt while charges kept hitting and credits were deducted even as he complained to support bots. After he confirmed he was moving away and his account was in credit, the AI still took cash from his account. Roughly 200 support emails produced no fix.

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

The AI wrote the Chinese messages that got his lost phone back

On a trip to Chaozhou, China, he lost his Android phone and does not speak Chinese. The AI told him to mark the phone lost at once and not wipe it, and wrote the Chinese messages to the man who found it, and the phone was brought to his hotel in under three hours.

Turn my subscriber surveys into personal year-long reading plans

Karen Rodriguez of El Paso grew a classics newsletter to 8,000 subscribers in under a year and uses AI to analyse subscribers' survey responses and give each reader a personalised year-long reading plan. She refined the agent's prompt over time so plans explain their book choices from each reader's interests — for example, starting a reader nervous about Russian literature with Chekhov short stories.

Read every job advert, tailor my CV and apply with my approval

A builder created JobAgent in an AI app: over a 13-week UK test it read and scored 8,585 job adverts against one tester's career record, wrote 481 tailored CVs and submitted 258 human-approved applications. The run produced 8 interviews and 3 offers — roughly one interview per 32 applications.

WorkPartly worked

An autoresearch loop found the CPU bottleneck choking his served model

Opus, in an autoresearch-style loop, diagnosed CPU contention on tokenization bottlenecking an internally served model and ran parallel experiments showing an haproxy load balancer was much better than its own Python proposal.

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

An agent now makes the promo posts for our 70 radio shows a month

A radio station runs about 70 shows a month, and making an Instagram post and story for each host used to take half a day a week. Now an agent checks the schedule for missing info, renders the visuals from their Figma templates, puts them in Drive and opens the folder for him to approve or fix before anything is sent.

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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.