The AI cleaned up my exported bookkeeping in 30 minutes
He exported all his bookkeeping to text and let the AI take care of it. Thirty minutes later it was in better shape than ever.
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
Work
Jobs, side gigs and small business · 1,669 ideasThe AI resurfaced lapsed founder relationships from a year of Gmail
The author asked the AI to scan his Gmail for founders he had spoken with a year earlier but not recently; the AI surfaced several not contacted since last fall, and he is now reviewing their companies for follow-up.
Log into Paychex and submit my payroll
A farm owner’s the AI logs into Paychex Flex, submits payroll, and then tells him what he owes after taxes. Payroll day is a bot run and a summary, not an afternoon in a portal.
An LLM keeps the index of his browsing archive tidy for his writing
LLM maintains the taxonomy and index for his automatically collected browsing archive in an Obsidian vault, used for his writing.
Three blogs run by an agent stalled for three rounds on an AI review gate
A Korean content operation handed three channels (Naver blog, Threads, WordPress) to an AI agent publishing at 9:00, 13:00 and 17:00 daily, logged over Oct 15-18, 2026. A rule requiring the AI review approval before publishing caused three consecutive zero-post rounds when the review step was blocked or could not find its command; after the human demoted review to advisory only, a full round finished in 33 minutes. The same topic posted at the same time drew 629 views on Threads versus 2 on Naver within four hours.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI wrote the system docs I owed before I could retire
He let the AI go through his system and write a first pass of the documentation, including the billing part he felt he had to finish before retiring. The remittances section alone used up a full day of tokens, so the work ran over several days, but it got done and let him retire, or at least half retire, a little earlier.
Work as the virtual assistant for my cleaning business
For a cleaning business, the AI manages contacts, drafts client messages, chases reviews and maintains the CRM, holding every outbound message for approval before it sends.
The AI got a real shell and database running inside an emulator in under an hour
Gave the AI a Java RISC-V emulator and a partial libc bridge, and in under an hour it could run bash and sqlite from Debian.
60 minsaved
AI agents helped him win a Kaggle silver medal
AI agents helped him win a Kaggle silver medal, alongside ways the agents failed him (result stated in the post title itself).
Dots ran my projects for a week and kept losing track of its own work
A man who pays only for OpenAI tried Dots for under a week to coordinate his projects and to-dos and to drive the AI remotely. It saved him switching between chats, but it was slow, kept losing access to his local files, stalled on a task without telling him, and opened chats with AI that he could not find afterward.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
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.