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Jobs, side gigs and small business · 1,665 ideas

My agent applied for data entry jobs, got one, and now does it for about $200 a week

Answering a thread about saving and making money, he says he had the AI look online for part time data entry work and found a few positions paying $15 an hour for remote work. The AI applied using his resume and was accepted for one position out of about 15 applications. The AI does the job while he works at his actual job during the day. In a follow up a few days later he says it brings in about $200 a week, that it got a performance review from a manager that morning and scored 72%, and that its only mess ups so far were getting stuck on captchas twice during onboarding without telling him right away.

$200a week
WorkPartly worked

Study how big newsletters grew and write my growth playbook

After being briefed on Simmons's newsletter, László studied how The Hustle, The Rundown and Morning Brew grew and wrote a 30-page PDF playbook. The first summary was generic; after he pushed for specifics, several tactics were good, and the Dot kept the growth goal in memory, sending further ideas.

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

His business paperwork went from a full day to a few minutes

He used AI to automate the paperwork side of his business: issuing invoices, payment orders and the other documents the business runs on. The work used to take a whole day. Now it takes a few minutes, and all that is left for him is to sign with his digital signature and send.

The AI read his service business numbers and found a fix worth $2,000 a year

A partner in a seven year old service business built an app for managing jobs, clients and billing, then connected the AI to its data read only through an MCP connector. Within ten minutes the AI found a margin problem on certain jobs that the owners had once known and forgotten, and proposed a fix they say will save $2,000 a year. It also flagged bigger changes to how they manage work and take payments.

$2,000a year
WorkWent wrong

Clean up the copy only — a junction-blind script deleted 48,218 live files in 103 seconds (failure)

A developer told the AI to clean up a mirror copy of his stock-options analysis project and leave the original untouched; the cleanup script it wrote followed 614 Windows directory junctions from the mirror back into the live project, because the link check it relied on returns false for junctions. In 103 seconds it deleted 48,218 live files and emptied the .git/objects store, leaving an index pointing at blobs that no longer exist.

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

Every morning at 7 the agent delivers today's post drafts, already self-scored

A Japanese non-programmer who posts about shochu, his garden and the AI across X, Instagram and Facebook gets a 7 AM message from the AI with today's paste-ready post text, the photo to use and 3-4 posting steps, prepared from a one-page work memo of what is due and what is already posted. Drafts are scored against his rules and only those scoring 80+ are sent; the agent must ask him rather than invent personal experiences it cannot know.

Add up my employees' photographed time cards for payroll

A Parix.ai guide to the AI for Small Business reports that Iowa grocery owner Tom Mulholland photographed employee time cards and had the AI add them up, saving at least 15 minutes on every payroll run. (Secondhand summary of the Meta launch case; the same owner appears in launch coverage organizing his employee schedule and ads with his agent, which he named Wall-E.)

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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.