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Work

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

Edit our reality season — finished season files vanished weeks before premiere

Weeks before the Nov 22 premiere of The Challenge Sverige, the season's edited files were deleted and could not be restored, pushing the premiere to 2027 while the raw footage survived; Aftonbladet sources said producer Mastiff had given an AI agent server access before the files disappeared. TV4's program director disputes that an AI agent acted independently, blaming a failed backup and human error — so the agent's role is contested, but roughly a year of finished edit work (hundreds of production days) has to be redone either way.

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

One owner, three organizations, and the AI doing the office work in Spanish

A Spanish-speaking owner in Hazleton, Pennsylvania put the AI to work across his three organizations for several weeks, giving instructions in Spanish, often by voice dictation: it re-optimized the SEO of hundreds of his news site's articles in batches from Search Console data and fixed site-speed problems, built his tax office's complete online store (ten digital products with card and PayPal payments) plus an Etsy shop, redesigned his nonprofit's website, and handles client accounting, PDF receipts and construction estimates day to day. Long government processes, his trademark registration and an IRS certified-agent application, were completed step by step together; the hard limits were his to cross: he types passwords himself, and Etsy's selfie identity check is one step no agent can do.

Agent searched jobs against his CV and built his application pack

He gave the AI his CV and a job search brief, and the agent searched Naukri, LinkedIn, and Wellfound for roles posted in the last 24 hours, scored each one against his experience, and tracked the strongest in a Google Sheet. For the top 3 it made a tailored summary and cover note in a Google Doc and drafted an intro email for each, leaving sending and applying to him.

My brother replaced a $1,500 machine program with one the AI built in an hour

A man bought a used piece of industrial machinery and the $1,500 control software did not come with it. With no coding experience at all, he asked the AI on the web to build a control app, and in under an hour he had a working app packaged as a .deb file for Linux. It cost him nothing because he used his brother's AI subscription.

$1,500
WorkWent wrong

I asked the AI to fix my phone number problem. Visible blocked it at every turn.

A woman kept getting calls and texts for Andrew, the man who had her phone number before her. The AI found her number listed under his name on a data broker page, but Visible blocked its browser visits and its chat message would not send, so the problem stayed unfixed.

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

An AI runs growth for his Chrome extension behind a one word approval

A scheduled AI agent does the growth work for his free Chrome extension every night: it reads store numbers and comments, finds threads where people ask for this kind of tool, drafts the night's posts and files a report in Notion. Nothing public goes out until he replies go. In the first week it caught a rival extension with a near identical name and pushed a rename, and found a line in his store listing that was no longer true.

The AI pulled my session notes so I could rewrite a client report

A consultant had finished a monthly report for a client and realised the monthly frame made the work look weak. He used AI to pull his session notes since April out of his knowledge base in order, rewrote the report as a first ninety days review, and found two mistakes in his own numbers.

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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.