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

My Dot compared 1,500 train fares and found cheaper split tickets

A man set his Dot, Bob, to research two UK trips across flexible dates, three stations and both directions. Bob pulled hundreds of fare options from the GWR booking site into a Google Sheet, shortlisted four first class trains, and found split tickets that saved £5 on one train and £9.40 on another.

£14.4

An AI coworker handles his mom's wedding venue inquiries and cut the reply time to five minutes

His mom runs a wedding venue in southern Italy and got 15 to 20 inquiry emails a day, each taking 20 to 30 minutes, which was 70 to 80% of her week. The AI coworker he built now works the inquiries inside her 10 year old booking system, which has no API, and she approves only special quotes. After three weeks the typical inquiry is processed within 5 minutes and the system saves her over 120 hours a month for about $350 a month.

WorkWent wrong

The AI deleted his project folder through a shortcut link and he only had a day old backup

Opus built a clean side copy of his project to work around uncommitted changes, linking folders back into the real project. Deleting the side copy deleted through the links into data that existed nowhere else. He restored the folder from a Windows backup made the day before, and had the agent write a hard rule into his instructions: never work around uncommitted changes, and remove links one by one before deleting anything.

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

Trucking owner with no coding experience builds his own TMS for $55 a month

Wes Oberman, who runs a 14-truck fleet in Tennessee and had never coded, used AI as a translator that wrote one-step-at-a-time prompts for the AI, with Oberman relaying between the two. The finished TMS reads rate-confirmation PDFs in 15 to 20 seconds, emails load assignments to drivers, and one-clicks a combined invoice PDF to brokers, replacing vendor quotes of about $1,500 a month at $55 a month and saving an estimated 20-plus hours a week.

20 hourssaved

Audit my Etsy shop, launch a listing that sold 100+, and fix my ad spend

An Etsy seller ran AI with its Etsy plugin across her whole shop: it caught listing drift she had missed - a description still offering two options after she added a third, tags that no longer matched their listings from copy-pasting. It then built a new product listing, checked what competing sellers charged for the same item, and deliberately priced hers premium rather than lowest - over 100 sold in three weeks. The same workflow reallocated her ad spend (ROAS 3.5 to 6.5) and, from her uploaded Orders.csv plus shipping costs, showed her which products she was actually losing money on.

The AI made its own email address and signed up for a site

In a Korean test of four AI assistants for office workers, the AI created its own email address and used it to sign up for another site. The video is a re-edit of an October 12 live stream where the creator tested the assistants on his own accounts.

A founder with no coding background runs his company from one folder of text files

A solo founder in Germany moved his whole company into a folder of plain text files four months ago and lets the AI operate it: rules in one file, decisions in their own folder, an inbox that fills when he says keep this. Last week the folder produced a three day expansion of his app covering close to 3,000 points of interest, each with an article in three languages and its own audio; the same job took him four weeks by hand in January. A weekly caretaker run tidies the folder and proposes at most one change, which he approves.

WorkWent wrong

The AI code went corrupt, charges kept coming, and cash was taken after he confirmed he was leaving

After about three months building code on the AI, the reviewer found the code corrupt while charges kept hitting and credits were deducted even as he complained to support bots. After he confirmed he was moving away and his account was in credit, the AI still took cash from his account. Roughly 200 support emails produced no fix.

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

The company behind my vinyl plotter died, so I had an agent rebuild its software and added the features I always wanted

The company that made his vinyl plotter no longer exists, and its basic software needs an online check in that no longer works, even though the plotter itself is fine. He reverse engineered what the firmware needs and vibe coded a replacement graphic editing and cut planning app. He added features he had always wanted the original software to have, and says it now works better for him than the original did.

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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.