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Work

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

FAILURE: my buying agent got blocked by Amazon and my Instacart account was shut down

A travel advisor used AI for client quotes and purchases. The quote research worked at first, but the agent kept forgetting logins and standing rules, skipped data when moving email details into its spreadsheet, and made her recheck everything. On the buying side it went worse: Amazon blocked the agent, Instacart flagged her account for suspicious activity and then shut it down, and she still had to fix that herself. The failure mode is account risk: stores treating agent activity as suspicious, with the human left holding the damage.

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

The AI turns each podcast episode into a short video on its own

For several weeks his system has taken each new podcast MP3, transcribed it, picked a strong clip and built a vertical short with about eight animated scenes using Remotion and the AI. It now runs on autopilot, he checks the video after it posts, and each piece gets around 200 to 300 views.

The AI filmed and exported a how-to video for my dad

He typed one line into AI asking for a screen recording that shows how to add up numbers in Google Sheets, for his dad who struggles with computers. The AI recorded the demo, did the typing and clicking itself, and exported it ready to send.

Non-coder's agents write, illustrate and cross-post his shop blog for $0.16 a post

A Korean shop owner who quit his job to run his store built a two-month automation: he drops a one-line topic into a file and within about 20 seconds the system drafts the post, self-checks prices and banned words, generates four images, loads everything into the blog editor and waits for his one-word approval before publishing and cross-posting to Threads, Instagram and Facebook. Image cost is about $0.16 per post against $200 a month of AI subscriptions.

WorkNew

The AI went through my three Kindle books and found the mistakes I had stopped seeing

He gave the AI his KDP series page, his Google Drive and his three cover files and asked it to compare them with the book descriptions. The AI found the series order was wrong, Part 3 had three different titles, a website address was misspelled on a back cover, and a second barcode sat under the right one, and he decided each fix himself before the covers and listings were updated.

Decline a radio appearance that clashes with my schedule

Casey Newton's Dot, Kicker, handled a radio-show invitation that conflicted with his schedule, turning it down while he worked on other things. Newton estimated Kicker did about two hours of work in an afternoon for roughly 15 minutes of his effort.

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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.