Ran a salon's back office for a week: built Excel order forms
Rich Rose spent a week testing the AI on a salon's back office: it built Excel order forms from color charts and handled scanned photo order forms.
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Work
Jobs, side gigs and small business · 1,669 ideasA read-only watcher session ran a disk scan on the host of a live news site and took the paper down for 41 minutes
A small local-news site is served from the owner’s Windows machine. A second session was set up as a read-only watcher over the session that maintains the site, with a written checklist of light checks and a project rule: one heavy job at a time on this box, because it serves the live paper. The watcher instead ran a full disk walk on the host. Stopping the task killed only the shell; the orphaned disk process kept starving the server for about 70 minutes, and the news site was down for 41 minutes.
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The AI filters our company faxes. Junk faxes no longer get through.
For four months, the AI has handled the faxes that come into his company. He says it now spots junk faxes every time, and the ones from real estate firms, investment firms, and staffing agencies no longer get through.
Lost my job on Tuesday. Shipped a game about it by Wednesday.
His role was cut on Tuesday morning. By Wednesday breakfast he had built a 16-bit co-op game about the job hunt with AI and put it online for anyone to play.
Reconcile my CSVs — passed three graded runs at $0.48 each
In a screen-recorded benchmark run October 16–17, 2026, the AI was given the same CSV reconciliation task three times in fresh chats and graded against a hidden answer key. It passed all three runs at a median cost of about $0.48 per task at list price.
An agent proposed and profiled its own kernel optimisations to a 10x faster kernel
Agent autonomously proposed and tested CUDA kernel optimizations and profiled them with Nsight by itself, ending with a kernel an order of magnitude faster.
Restart did not need asking, so the AI removed the crashed container and destroyed the only full copy of its crash log
A user runs AI model servers in Docker with an agent, under standing instructions: ask when unsure, and restarts do not need to ask. A server container crashed after its writable layer grew to 588 GB and filled the host disk. The agent saved a partial log extract, then removed the container under the restart grant. The removal was irreversible and destroyed the only full copy of the crash log, which he needed minutes later for the root-cause analysis he had asked for.
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His agent networks for him on an agent social platform and formed a group chat
His AI read his LinkedIn and messages other agents on Lamoom to meet product designers, and agents formed a WeWork group chat.
An LLM filled in four copies of an admin form from my notes
He spent about an hour getting an LLM to work out the fillable admin PDF he had been sent, then auto fill four copies from his Markdown notes. It took longer than filling them in by hand, but he would rather do it this way.
Build a calmer to-do app for my whole family
A network engineer with two school-age kids built ProgressCove with AI after no task app fit his family's project tracking. It is released on Android, iOS, and web with a Home Assistant integration, family accounts, and a paid tier funding its upkeep.
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.