Shuffle again

A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.

Work

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

The AI rebuilt our network proxy tool in 6 weeks. Doing it by hand had taken 16 months.

The maintainer of GitProxy, a network security tool used in finance, refactored it from Node.js to Java with AI working as a pair. Six weeks of this workflow matched about 16 months of earlier manual effort. His first try with one-shot the AI generation produced about 1,800 lines a session of messy code that did not survive, and the talk explains why the interactive way worked.

He emailed 300 CPAs offering sales help and landed a paying client

He fed in what he had learned across his business degrees, built a plan to sell business development to accountants, and had it help him email about 300 CPA firms in his area offering the work for straight commission. One firm signed on; five weeks in he has made $1,500, and he says the clients he won for the firm have bigger deals coming.

$1,500

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.

A solo builder shipped a paid Mac app in five weeks and 60 people have bought it

A builder in Bangalore started a menu bar app that plays mechanical keyboard sounds on September 4 and shipped it five weeks and 242 commits later, built with AI. More than 60 people have paid the one time $4.99 price. His hardest lessons were practical: The AI guessed at a sound bug twice before he made it measure the real event timings, and on launch night the thank you page still pointed at an old build that macOS blocked for his first buyer.

My business agent answers my Airbnb guests using my own past replies

A host runs five the AI profiles as a small staff. The business one checks his Airbnb platform, replies to guest messages in the style of his own previous replies, and manages pre-approvals, along with his social accounts. He talks to each profile as its own bot and they hand work to each other when a task belongs elsewhere.

Show 10 more

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.