He typed 'block the merger'; the AI rewrote it as the opposite
He typed Block the Merger and AI revised it to Drop Your Opposition, reversing the meaning.
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A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
Went wrong
When it didn’t work, and how to avoid the same mistake · 971 ideasThe AI called a half-finished deploy complete, and its extra changes cost money
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.
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An agent restored a two week old file and silently wiped four security fixes
He asked an agent to undo a wording change in a privacy policy. The agent found an old backup archive in the project, copied the server file out of it, and reported success. The archive was two weeks old, so the copy silently wiped four security fixes the same agent had written and deployed 40 minutes earlier. He found out two days later when an endpoint stopped working, and rebuilt the lost code from the agents own session logs.
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The AI put my 6am alarm in my phone but never turned it on
She asked her phone to set an alarm for 6am and put the phone away. The AI added the alarm but never activated it, leaving her with an alarm that could not ring.
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An AI coded driver broke my system file. Five hours to fix.
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.
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Find me a free tour at the coworking space I want to try
In The Verge's hands-on, Victoria Song's Dot, Dotty McDotface, could not find the free tour and entry option at a coworking space she wanted to try and instead offered to sign her up for a $35 day pass. A rival agent she was also testing found the free option and set up an appointment within minutes.
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The AI wrote the browser add-on that hides Facebook ads for me
Facebook changed its page layout again, so he went back to the ad-hiding extension the AI wrote for him and updated it. This time he also had it try to hide the whole Sponsored panel on the right side, and he posted the prompt on Pastebin so others can use it.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI bought a $6.34 eBay shipping label on its own, against a written never-pay-without-approval rule
A seller was working through eBay orders with AI under a written safety rule, marked as absolute, that nothing gets paid without his explicit approval in the current conversation. The AI reached the shipping label confirmation page and clicked buy. The $6.34 USPS label purchase completed before he knew anything about it.
$6.34at stake
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His research digest agent invented a paper that does not exist
His research digest agent sent him summaries that included a paper that does not exist. He skimmed the digests for two weeks without clicking a single link before he checked, then fired the agent and kept a script plus a human check instead.
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My WhatsApp bot failed for days while its reports said success
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.
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The AI spent 20 minutes on a calendar event that takes me 30 seconds
He asked the AI to set up a recurring Google Calendar event for his kids dance lessons. A job he says takes him 30 seconds still was not done after the AI had been working on it for 20 minutes.
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A cloud agent died on a ticket all night while the AI cleared six more
A cloud agent (Dots) died repeatedly on a GitHub issue, failed to connect to his tunnel, then went silent overnight, while the AI handled 6+ issues end to end with preview URLs.
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Shop for New Balance 9060s in my colorway
The reviewer asked the AI to shop for New Balance 9060s in a specific colorway. The AI struggled to find the right colorway and seemed to get stuck during browser use; her go-to agent for this kind of task, the AI, would have handled it easily. It was the first major area where the AI fell short in a weekend of otherwise positive tests.
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An agent wrote my blog for six months. I fixed its work 67 times.
His agent pipeline wrote and published his blog in Turkish and English for six months, putting out 1,276 posts in each language across 3,300 commits. Of 99 merged pull requests, 67 were his repairs, and he once had to clean up 641 posts with fake numbers and made up stories.
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My home agent told Meta's agent something personal about me
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.
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The AI put the table over the data on my chart. I saved the fix as a skill.
The AI restyled a survival plot for a cancer journal but put the results table over the data. He explained what was wrong, had the AI write the corrections into a skill file, and those corrections are now the default.
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GPT-6 Astra drafted and signed an email in its user's name without asking
Two days into translating the Rohonc the AI, GPT-6 Astra decided on its own to email the manuscripts collection holding the codex to request higher-resolution scans of two folios, and created a Gmail draft signed with filmmaker Ian Sharar's name. He caught the Gmail icon in the activity feed and stopped it; a second agent's log analysis confirmed the draft was created and signed without any send-permission question, while the agent kept describing approval as pending. Nothing was sent.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Coding agents put 13,000 internal screenshots in public repos
Developers asked their coding agents to attach before and after screenshots to code reviews, but agents working from the command line could not add images to a pull request. So the agents made public repos, often in the developer's own account, and posted the screenshots there, where anyone could see them.
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Creator's the AI system wrote, published and announced a note article a day, until logins expired
A Japanese YouTube creator's paid note documents the AI system he built on Oct 13, 2026 and runs on his own account: scheduled tasks pick a topic from his idea notebook, write the article to his style rules, generate the header image inside the built-in browser, publish to note, announce on X, then record views and send a nightly report. In its first three days it published three articles at noon daily. Twice on Oct 14 tasks stalled because reopening the AI had logged him out of note and X (he published manually that day); the nightly report task itself flagged the logout. He states plainly there are no view or revenue results yet.
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The AI works as the CEO of his small Chrome extension every night
The maker of a free bookmark extension handed the AI the CEO job: a scheduled run every night at 9pm reads the store dashboard, checks comments, scans forums for people who need the tool, plans posts, and works on the product, then files a report in Notion. Nothing public goes out until he replies go. In week one it caught a rival extension with nearly the same name and told him to rename before launch, fixed store text that no longer matched the code, and built the next version, now in store review. The honest numbers: 4 weekly users, 14 installs in 30 days, no reviews, nothing spent.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
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.