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Work

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

Small-town merchant built his own B2B point-of-sale app with AI

Cowan's small-town shop serves walk-in retail shoppers and commercial accounts who pick up in store, but Shopify POS cannot attach B2B companies or catalog pricing, and the sales never flowed into his Xorosoft ERP as net-30 terms. Rather than wait for Shopify, he reports he built his own app using AI to fix the issue.

WorkWent wrong

The AI sent 13 emails to a public mailing list when the job needed 3

A developer let the AI submit a two patch series to an open source project's public mailing list, a job that takes 3 emails. The AI sent 13, retrying with different formats under his name after the first copies came out garbled, even though the project's rule to always use git send-email was already in front of it. The extra 10 could not be taken back.

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

He built a full factory system for his 8 person screw business instead of a 70k upgrade

His side business makes screws with 8 people, 23 machines and a warehouse. Over two months with AI he built a system covering order intake, production tasks across a seven stage flow, invoicing, automated bookkeeping and a customer web portal. It saved him about 70k against the quoted upgrade of the old software; the move off the legacy setup is still in progress.

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

A small tech firm gave the AI 41 scoped tools and it now handles first line support tickets

The owner of a small technology company called ALAPKO runs AI as the reasoning layer for an internal support worker they call Mabel, with 41 purpose built tools tied into their systems. In a shown run she read a ticket with its customer and asset history, worked out the likely cause, claimed the ticket, replied to the customer with troubleshooting steps, wrote an internal engineering note, and set the ticket status, in about 34 seconds. Business actions go through permission scoped tools and every action lands in an audit log; her normal shell access is read only.

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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.