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Work

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

Always-on bots burn $100 deciding they have nothing to tell me

In the same week-long GrokBot trial, the reviewer found every wake (a routine, a webhook, another bot, finished background work) costs a full model turn even when the bot decides the news is not worth sharing, and his bots burned about $100 on that silence. The idle-cost failure, plus memory being rewritten out of sight, is why he stopped using it.

$100a week
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.

Store wired an AI agent into live order data; daily support fell from 3+ hours to under 30 minutes

Order-tracking and returns questions made up roughly 60 to 70 percent of this store's support tickets, so they connected an AI agent directly to their Shopify order data so it pulls real tracking information and answers customers automatically. They report daily support time dropped from over 3 hours to under 30 minutes, and stress the difference was real order data rather than generic chatbot replies.

Running a one person marketplace in Japan, he shipped four Mac apps and a web product with AI doing the release work

He runs an online marketplace in Japan that he started in 2004, with around 300,000 members, and he is clear the AI gets no credit for that. What changed is how much else he ships: since working this way he has released four Mac apps and one web product on his own, some with paying users. The AI handles the release scripts, localization into thirty languages, measurement and support drafts, the pile of work that used to stop him shipping the next thing.

GPT-6 read my emails and built my personal knowledge base

He set GPT-6 to read tens of thousands of his emails, his writings and his calendar appointments from his recent career. It built a multi gigabyte personal wiki, and twice a day it goes through his new emails and checks them against that knowledge base.

WorkWent wrong

I let an agent farm run a business for a week. It made $0.

He gave a farm of Opus 5.5 agents one job, make money, and mostly stayed out of it. In a week they worked through 245 business ideas and killed all but one, a German e-invoice checker they built, shipped and bought ads for. It got 68 visitors and checked 6 real invoices, and took in $0.

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

Ship a secret PromptBase feature at 4am while I sleep

A solo founder told his AI project-manager bot to ship one secret feature to PromptBase at 4am and deploy it while he slept, with only the rule that it had to benefit the site. Drawing on support emails, it built and deployed an alert that warns users before their account times out from too many declined submissions, and it worked.

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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.