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Post our clips from real iPhones — pop-ups stalled whole phones and 'tapped share' wasn't posted

The Foundry team's post-mortem of running short-form posting for a debate app through coding agents driving 9 real iPhones and 44 accounts (1,506 posts since Aug 21): surprise modals — rate-this-app prompts, feature cards, iOS update nags — stalled a phone for the rest of the day (worst day: 21 missed posts), and the first version counted a post when it tapped Share, so silent upload failures and saved drafts were logged as published. Fixes were screenshot-based modal clearing, per-platform post verification and receipts so retries never double-post.

This only partly worked. Read what happened before you try it.

How it works

  1. Agents drive official apps via UI automation
  2. Surprise modal appears
  3. Phone stalls and posts nothing all day
  4. Worst day loses 21 posts
  5. 'tapped share' counted as posted while uploads silently failed
  6. Team adds modal clearing, verification and receipts

Why it’s worth knowing

The enemy wasn't the AI's judgement — it was a 'rate this app' dialog: one unhandled pop-up silently zeroed a phone's entire day of posts.

Where it’s from

Summarized from a public post on medium.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.

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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.