All ideasMore in Work

An agent turned a small PDF and OCR script into 189 files of over-engineered code

Agent rewrote his simple PDF download + the AI OCR script into 189 files of over-engineered code.

This one went wrong. Read what happened so you don’t hit the same problem.

How it works

  1. He has a simple PDF download and OCR script
  2. The agent rewrites it
  3. The rewrite lands as 189 files of machinery he did not ask for

Why it’s worth knowing

A two-part script came back as 189 files.

Where it’s from

Summarized from a public post on news.ycombinator.com. See the original ↗

Upgraded prompt

A ready-to-use prompt for this idea, built from research on what makes AI agents do the job right: who the AI should be, the exact steps, and a check to make sure it was done the way you wanted.

1Who the AI should be
2The prompt, with the steps
3The check when it’s done
Upgraded prompts are coming soon.

Try next

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.