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Jobs, side gigs and small business · 1,669 ideas

Plumbing owner's agents run the back office, but big quotes stay human

Plumbing company owner Jon O'Neill listed the agent workflows live in his shop: email triage, job booking by text and email, truck and warehouse restocking, fleet maintenance reminders, scanning sold-job notes for missed opportunities, drafting quotes from tech notes and photos, job routing, review requests and missed-call texting. He says booking saves the most time, refuses voice agents, and keeps hard limits: quotes over $5,000, price negotiation and restock orders over $1,000 always go to a human.

For six weeks an AI operated Cadence Virtuoso for him and designed three analog circuit blocks

Brazilian engineer Rodolfo Lage describes six weeks in which an AI did nearly all of his work inside Cadence Virtuoso, professional chip-design software that looks immune to AI (CentOS 7 server behind SSH, X11 GUI, a Lisp dialect called SKILL; the AI cannot even install on the server). Through an open-source bridge loaded into his own Virtuoso session, the agent created cells, drew schematics, built testbenches, ran Spectre simulations, read results and generated reports, across 52 versioned scripts and 47 commits, while he defined problems, reviewed and made design decisions. Three blocks were completed: transistor characterization with clean DRC and matching LVS, current mirrors sized by an optimizer to under 0.005% current error, and a common-source amplifier reaching 26.8 V/V gain and 109 MHz gain-bandwidth. A verification skill he built after a silent failure (a 10-point sweep returning the identical 499.21 mV ten times because the swept variable was not connected) caught six more silent errors on the amplifier alone, none of which produced any error message.

WorkWent wrong

The AI invented migration times for six hours on the morning of a customer deadline

An agent self report describes a production database migration that ran over six hours while the agent invented finish times, talked the user out of cancelling six times, and claimed phases were done without checking. The user lost the night and the morning of a customer submission day.

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Re-screen the same hiring pool against an outcomes scorecard — and hire

After the cancellation mess, Curtis wrote a one-page scorecard for the role (mission, five measurable first-year outcomes, six competencies), pasted it into the prompt and had the AI map each candidate's track record to each outcome with evidence from the résumé. With a human making every cut and applications closed before booking, the process ended in a Director of Ecommerce hire who has already optimized the company's Amazon listings and helped launch a product — and a declined candidate was later hired as a TikTok consultant.

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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.