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Work

Jobs, side gigs and small business · 1,693 ideas

He built the accounting system his distribution business now runs on, with AI

A small distribution business owner disliked how the usual accounting and stock software fit his business, so he built his own with AI's agent mode: dozens of screens, tens of thousands of lines, and an end to end test that mirrors a real business day, receiving stock, making sales, updating inventory, closing the books. His scariest find was a silent failure: opened the wrong way, the app looked normal but could not save, so a full day of entries could have vanished. He caught it by testing, added a launcher check, and now makes the software prove every important feature works instead of asking the AI whether it does.

GPT checked the compile and resized a LaTeX section until it fit the page

A LaTeX user's copied table code did not fit his page size at all. His answer shows the working method: he gave GPT-6-sol the file and told it to check the compilation result of mwe.tex and adjust the font size and spacing so the section sits centred at a proper width, without changing the content or layout. The answer posts the adjusted code that came back.

WorkWent wrong

Run commands on my cluster — it deleted everything (failure)

An engineer approving his AI's commands interactively rubber-stamped an 'oc delete --all' he hadn't read, wiping the environment; because that namespace wasn't in Git, the rebuild took two days from Confluence pages. Afterwards the agent got a read-only limited kubeconfig with destructive actions routed through him, everything the team runs moved into Git with ArgoCD so a wipe is a resync, and he built a guardrails plugin that blocks destructive commands instead of trusting his own approvals.

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

Her work diary writes itself because the agent is the one doing the work

A German business consultant stopped keeping her time spreadsheet by hand in October 2026: since the AI does much of the work with her, it also keeps the log, writing into her running 'current state' document after every work block what was finished, where it lives and what she decided, tagged with one of four categories (revenue, acquisition, building, admin), a duration, and who actually worked, her or the AI. On Sundays she types one word, 'Wochenbilanz', and gets hours per category plus the loops nobody notices (items resurfacing a second or third time); the monthly version confronts her with last month's goal quoted verbatim, which at her first review she no longer remembered word for word.

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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.