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Work

Jobs, side gigs and small business · 1,691 ideas
WorkPartly worked

Ask the AI what in my 1,412 unread emails actually needs me

Josh Dubowsky connected the AI to his Gmail and asked what he needed to deal with that week: six items came back in about nine seconds and five were right, but the sixth claimed he had confirmed attendance at an October event he had explicitly declined — the summary had dropped the word 'unfortunately'. Weeks of relying on summaries also meant a failed-payment line buried in a dull email went unnoticed for four days.

This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.

Check every new chapter against my series bible, daily

Author educator Christopher Kokoski set up a test the AI with a series bible in Google Drive for a mystery series (hero Rudy Relish: seven hard rules including a bad left knee, never touches a gun, no ketchup on the cart). He added the first three chapters of book four and had the AI check each against the bible and all other pages, on a daily scheduled check. Chapters 1-2 were clean; in chapter 3 the AI caught every one of several mistakes he had planted, including one he considered an unfair plant. (Test manuscript on a fresh account, run for a week.)

Update all 12 pages of my website in three minutes

Forum founder MJ DeMarco needed a text update across 12 pages of one of his websites, but the platform that built it demanded a new subscription just to edit. He gave the AI access to the site folder instead; it made all the changes in about 3 minutes, avoiding an estimated hour of manual editing and a $20/month subscription.

$20a month

Plumbing firm's voice agent books 600+ jobs from calls that used to go unanswered

Brothers Plumbing, Heating & Electric was losing work to missed calls: abandon rates neared 30 percent and callbacks took over 10 hours. ServiceTitan's AI Virtual Agent now answers in seconds and books jobs around the company's real capacity, service zones, technician skill sets and job types; the abandon rate fell to 5 percent, more than 600 jobs have been booked by the agent, and the company attributes $1.33 million in revenue to it.

$1,330,000
WorkWent wrong

Five ways his unsupervised agents actually failed at night

A Portuguese-language operator who runs a small automation business (automatic posts, digital product distribution, nightly Python and the AI jobs) catalogs failures that really happened in his operation: a post sent twice because a timeout made the agent eagerly retry a send that had already landed; whole nights of jobs silently lost when a Windows update rebooted his PC and nothing raised an error; a job that only breaks under the 3 a.m. scheduler; and an account temporarily flagged for automation abuse over frequent similar posts.

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

Run my whole company on scheduled agent shifts

A digital-health CEO reports his businesses have no full-time developers, DevOps, designers, analysts or product manager: scheduled AI agent shifts handle deploys, an agent-built CRM, per-business-line email sorting, meeting scheduling, technical support and publishing news four times a day. The work runs on three $200 AI subscriptions — $600 a month against roughly $38,500 a month at US median pay for the replaced roles.

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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.