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Work

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

Field my land-sale inquiries — it offered buyers $1

Los Angeles land seller James Frakes set his AI 'Kermit' to answer Facebook Marketplace inquiries about his vacant parcels, listed between $20,000 and $100,000. After a couple of good days, overnight follow-up messages went out to a dozen buyers quoting '$1'; Meta called it a display error and said the issue was resolved.

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

A team of bots runs the back office at my building company

Luke Davies runs Davies Construction with a team of the AI set up like a company org chart, with bots for estimating, admin, books, sales and project work. Day to day the bots sort the inbox and draft replies, pull tasks out of meeting notes into a list a person approves, and create and update the job tasks in ClickUp as work moves on the Wunderbuild board.

Run my salon SaaS with an AI advisor that vetoes features

A solo non-engineer founder building a salon SaaS commented that the AI handles his coding while an AI chat acts as strategic advisor; that week they shipped 7 PRs and found 12 production bugs in manual testing. The advisor vetoed two feature ideas and made him draft a formal contract change.

WorkWent wrong

A 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.

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

Triage every dependency update like a supply-chain investigation

The solo maintainer of the karasu modeling language runs dependency updates through an AI skill that investigates each Dependabot PR before anyone merges: release notes, the diff between tags, publisher or ownership changes, install-time scripts, lockfile edges and known advisories, written up as merge, hold or reject recommendations in a design doc. In the week of Oct 10–17 three triage rounds fed 88 merged PRs (16 from Dependabot) and 12 architecture decision records, and the process caught a rebuilt lockfile silently moving a package off the reviewed version.

The AI keeps track of my 15 apps and sites for me

He runs about 15 apps and sites and could not keep track of what needed doing. He connected the AI to his app through MCP, and the AI now creates tasks and subtasks, writes notes, and shows him what is needed by priority and due date.

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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.