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Work

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

I asked Telus AI to fix my cable. It tried to sell me a $90 a month contract.

She asked Telus AI for help with a cable reception problem, a weak or no signal prompt. Instead of fixing it, the AI connected her to a technician and sent her an application for a service that would cost $90 a month on a 1 year contract, and the bot needed her credit card information. She said no.

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The AI picked the subscriptions out of our card statement

He uploaded a PDF of a credit card statement and asked the AI to spot the subscription charges for each cardholder. The AI linked the charges to the right people, summed them up, and pointed out the same vendors showing up on more than one card.

WorkWent wrong

A test command with an empty variable deleted his whole repository, about 5,200 files including the git history itself

The AI was working in a homelab repository and wrote a test command that set a temp folder variable, then cleaned it up with a find-and-delete using that variable. An earlier step in the chain failed, so the variable was never set. Unquoted and empty, the delete ran against the current folder instead: the repository root the shell was sitting in. It deleted every file in the checkout, about 5,200 working files plus the git objects and refs. Only files the sandbox mounted read-only survived.

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A sales manager with no coding background wired the AI into his CRM, mail and notes

He is a sales manager who does not code. In five weeks he built a system that connects the AI to his CRM, Microsoft 365, his reMarkable and his Plaud recorder. It tracks meetings and calls, updates his todo list, drafts follow ups and puts them in his calendar, imports business cards, prepares quotations, keeps the CRM updated with meeting reports, benchmarks his prices against competitors, sends personalised mailings, and every night reads the day's email and prepares a recap of the next day.

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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.