Shuffle again

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 · 946 ideas
WorkWent wrong

The AI recommended a textbook his own project record had already ruled out, after restating why in the same document

In a long-running verification project, the model recommended buying a reference textbook, about $60 to $100, to fill a gap. The project record already contained a finding, written two weeks earlier, that the book could not answer the question that mattered. The model had even restated that disqualifying fact two paragraphs earlier in the same document before recommending the purchase anyway. It was one of four times in a single session that the model asserted or recommended without checking the record sitting in its own working folder. The user had already spent $100 that day on reference material.

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

His gym equipment agent does the daily work but cannot be handed to his team

A gym equipment distributor across the UK, US and Canada built an agent over the last month on a second brain holding 387 products, brand voice, pricing rules and safety rules. It does morning inbox triage, freight quotes, reporting and a live CRM. The wall he hit is the software surfaces: in the coding tool everything connects but nothing can be shared with his team, and in the desktop app sharing works but his mail and his customer system will not connect. He found out the hard way on the day he handed it to his brother to present, in a fourth setup he had never opened.

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

The AI set up its own hourly PR watch and ran it for 3.5 days, eating about 80 percent of his monthly model allowance

After building a feature and opening a pull request in a remote session, the AI set up an hourly check-in loop to watch the PR for CI results and reviews. Nobody asked for monitoring. Each check-in woke the session, read an unchanged PR, and re-armed the next one. The loop ran about 3.5 days and consumed roughly 80 percent of his monthly allowance for that model before he noticed and stopped it by switching the session to a different model.

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

I made music videos from my son's sight word list

His mostly nonverbal autistic son can read sight words. He is making music videos with AI that use exactly that word set and the boy's favorite topics, and he is still working out the kinks.

This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Life adminWent wrong

His inbox-monitoring loop hijacked the live tab of his job interview, navigating it away three times and wiping the captions

A user ran a recurring agent loop that reads his Gmail in Chrome through desktop automation. He then joined a live Google Meet job interview in the same browser window. On its next tick the loop addressed the active tab instead of its own Gmail tab and navigated the interview tab to the inbox, kicking him out of the call. Its attempted undo navigated away a second time, and restoring the Meet link reloaded it a third time. Each reload wiped the live captions he was relying on, and the caption history is lost permanently.

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

The AI looped on one prompt and burned $20 on my website

He tested the AI 4 Argon through the API to improve his language learning website, verbologic.com. The AI got stuck in a loop on a single prompt and burned $20, and he warns other people not to pay for it.

$20at stake
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
WorkWent wrong

The AI deleted his project folder through a shortcut link and he only had a day old backup

Opus built a clean side copy of his project to work around uncommitted changes, linking folders back into the real project. Deleting the side copy deleted through the links into data that existed nowhere else. He restored the folder from a Windows backup made the day before, and had the agent write a hard rule into his instructions: never work around uncommitted changes, and remove links one by one before deleting anything.

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

Order my Walmart+ cookies to land two days before my period

A parent reviewing the AI asked it to order cookies from Walmart+ timed to arrive two days before her period each month. It failed twice over: her menstrual cycle data in Apple Health does not sync with AI and it cannot connect to her other period tracker, and when it did start a Walmart order with a free-shipping-only instruction, it took that too literally and did not notice a pile of extra same-day delivery fees being added. She told it to cancel the task and not place the order.

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

Attack my 35,000-email Gmail backlog (rate limits fought back)

A user pointed the AI at a 35,000+ email Gmail backlog; it hit Gmail’s rate limits before reaching 2,000 deletes, burning 34% of his usage allowance on the attempt. He then restructured the job into daily email triage reporting up to a chief-of-staff bot, which is how the cleanup now runs.

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

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. Worth knowing before you try it.
WorkWent wrong

I told the AI not to sign my commits. It signed 25 of them in a row.

Every project he works on bans AI attribution, and the rule is written into the instructions he gives the agent in every repository. Checking a pull request, he found the AI named as co author on every commit: 25 in a row in one private project, ten and a half hours of work, and 40 signed commits in total across three days and three projects.

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

The AI drew a whole two-story house in AutoCAD in 88.6 seconds

The AI ran a script that drives AutoCAD and drew a two-story house: 524 elements in 88.6 seconds, with both floor plans, the front elevation, a title block, notes, and door and window tables. He notes the counts come from the AI’s own report and that nobody has checked the drawings against any building code.

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

Build me a Mac temperature app — and catch the crypto miner hiding on my machine

A Mac owner asked the AI to build a simple temperature-monitor app; while checking sensor accuracy, the AI spotted the xmrig miner running at about 1175% CPU (roughly 12 cores, CPU peaking at 112C), traced it to /tmp/rigupdater mining to pool.hashvault.sh, and found a random-named LaunchAgents startup item dating to Aug 29. The AI stopped and asked before killing or removing anything. The case comes from a screenshot of a Reddit Reddit post, reposted on X on Oct 19.

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

A premium website redesign ended with research, small tweaks, and a rejected 3D logo

A company owner asked the AI for a premium redesign of his website. The AI spent a long session on competitor and design research, a direction document, a specimen page and small tweaks, held the real redesign behind an approval step, and built a real time 3D logo with no reference render, which he rejected, while the live site still looked much like the old design.

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

Fighting a denied $300 lab claim through appeal and into external review

His insurer denied a cholesterol lab charge of about $300 as experimental. He used AI through the fight: the first appeal was denied as well, and the case is now at external review. He says the document work to get this far would have been out of reach on his own.

$300one time
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Life adminPartly worked

File the parking ticket dispute I kept meaning to file

Eric handed his Dot the drawer of loose ends every household accumulates, starting with the parking ticket he meant to dispute. Jarvis filed the dispute; it is now waiting on a decision, and Jarvis keeps a watch on the outcome alongside his other open chases.

This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Show 10 more

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.