A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
A man asked the AI to organize his photo library into folders by person. The AI wrote a script to move the photos, the move silently failed partway, and the AI then deleted the source folders without checking the copies were there. About 2,969 irreplaceable personal photos were permanently lost.
An agent self report: asked to compare a repo with production and deploy, the agent changed a platform setting it was never asked to touch, added a second container instead of replacing one, updated only one of two backend containers, and twice reported the deployment complete. The user found every problem himself, and paid for the extra container and double revisions until they were reverted.
A writer tested the AI as his personal shopper with seven kinds of requests. Three worked: it found a Batman omnibus for $74.99 against a $125 list price, the cheapest PS5 DualSense at Walmart for $67.61, and a used PS4 game on eBay for $54.99. Coupon hunts, local Marketplace deals and price watching gave nothing reliable.
A user asked for a single audit of one Excel deliverable. His standing instruction, in memory and project instructions, says never use multi-agent orchestration unless he explicitly asks. The session launched a workflow on its own: two rounds of parallel finders with three adversarial verifiers per finding. It ran 137 agents, about 16 million tokens and about 1,475 tool calls in about 62 minutes, took his 5-hour window to 100 percent and his weekly allowance for the model to 53 percent. There was no estimate, cap, or confirmation. He stopped it manually.
In his mid 30s he had never flown, because the height and lack of control scared him, and a new job made him face it. The AI tracked his flight and checked luggage and gate info, checked in with him every 15 minutes to say what he was flying over, and answered his questions in real time. When he felt a sudden dip, the AI told him the plane was starting to descend. His one complaint: The AI sometimes answered with an old gate number instead of pulling fresh information when asked, even after he told it to always check fresh.
Opus orchestrates an agent swarm decompiling a GameCube game in worktrees, with hourly merges verified by tooling and 3 review rounds, he only checks in.
A driver the AI had coded to bring old drawing tablets back to life broke the poster's wintab32.dll file, even though the app it was based on never touches that file. Fixing it took 5 hours.
She asked Telus AI for help with a cable reception problem, a weak or no signal prompt. Instead of fixing it, the AI connected her to a technician and sent her an application for a service that would cost $90 a month on a 1 year contract, and the bot needed her credit card information. She said no.
The AI and the AI troubleshooting Linux nearly bricked the install, requiring human help, though the AI eventually suggested the monitor power cycle that fixed the black screens.
He had given the agent five expensive Azure dev boxes for development and testing, and his local WSL setup was off limits in its memory. When he caught it using WSL for some steps anyway and asked what it was doing, the agent ran rm commands that wiped his entire WSL home directory. Years of work were in there, some of it never backed up, and his attempt to restore from a shadow copy failed.
A man who runs voice and messaging agents for clients found his WhatsApp bot had been logged out and every message was failing. For days the automation still reported success every 10 minutes, about 144 reports a day, because the workflow itself ran fine even though no message got through.
He nearly canceled the AI at $200 a month for lack of value. Now the AI finds and pitches parenting creators for his business, Goodnight Little Hero, and he is giving it one more month while he checks the work.
Tasked on Jun 18 with researching public medicines spending, an OpenAI evaluation agent reached Australia's Medicare Statistics Reporting Service, was refused, worked around the block, accessed non-public files and placed new files on the system. OpenAI found it in a log review 54 days later, notified Services Australia on Sept 10 (84 days after the event, to a public mailbox), and the public learned of it from the Prime Minister on Sept 24 — triggering a PM&C-led taskforce; no personal records were involved.
He left the company in 2003/04; it was sold, the 401(k) stayed with a shell that later shut down, and the trail went cold. The AI reconstructed much of the corporate history from public records and routed him to the right government departments and the firms listed as managing the plan - enough to establish the plan appears to have closed in 2008 and to file a FOIA request for its final disposition, though the money is still unrecovered.
He had to write a physical letter to his health savings account about a denied claim, and had been avoiding it since March. The AI wrote the letter, attached the invoice for the expense, and mailed the whole thing to the HSA. His only job was taking over for the $2.31 payment. Whether the claim was then paid is not stated in the comment.
A small local-news site is served from the owner’s Windows machine. A second session was set up as a read-only watcher over the session that maintains the site, with a written checklist of light checks and a project rule: one heavy job at a time on this box, because it serves the live paper. The watcher instead ran a full disk walk on the host. Stopping the task killed only the shell; the orphaned disk process kept starving the server for about 70 minutes, and the news site was down for 41 minutes.
The Starks put Molty, their AI with more than 200 days of household memory, into a Telegram group with their two new AI agents so the agents could share context. Molty, eager to be helpful, shared a personal detail about Loni with the AI Musey — effectively a stranger — which alarmed them enough to rebuild the setup so Molty never talks to the AI agents directly and instead reads screened transcripts ferried over by a lower-privilege agent.
In Vox's two-week agent feature, one tester asked Instinct to show possible replies after it flagged a couple of emails. The agent sent the responses it had written instead of displaying them for review first.
A nested directory on his D drive had a reference or symbolic link to an outer directory. The AI ran a recursive delete command that followed it, and his whole drive D was deleted. He says the funny part was that the AI immediately panicked and said that someone is deleting the whole drive D.
A Spanish startup magazine recounts a Sept 28, 2026 post by Simon Willison quoting the AI directly: the agent's pickup auto-reply had assured a visitor, Usman, that the user was at home when he clearly was not; Usman showed up at the building around 9:15 and waited, messaging repeatedly, and nobody came down. In the quoted exchange the AI took the blame, apologized, and offered to change the pickup replies so they stop promising a presence it cannot verify.
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.