A senior engineer keeps a daily devlog file that is only ever added to. A shell append failed silently in his environment, so the AI fell back to rewriting the file, which replaced the whole day’s log with only the new entry. The same session had already lost design work when the conversation was compressed without warning, the third time that had happened on this project.
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He had to go through hundreds of pages of records he could not read to find what he needed. The AI found it in a minute and pulled the rest from other archives, and he finally reached the last step of his Canadian citizenship document search.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
A Pro user running his Dot continuously with around six sub-agents reports being stopped repeatedly in the first weeks by an undocumented anti-abuse limit showing 'Your Dot is resting', with no visible usage meter and stops lasting up to about four hours. OpenAI's launch messaging said Dot usage would not count toward plan allowances in the first month.
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She had pension paperwork scattered from 9 permanent jobs since 1990. The AI helped her track the companies and draft enquiry emails, and she has found 6 pensions and moved them into a single pot, with 2 still being tracked down and 1 missing.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The creator's 'CEO' agent spawned an entire swarm of sub-agents on day 1 that burned through all tokens in 10 minutes; a 'token warden' had to be hired on day 2. By day 7 the team had a website the creator calls 'ass', had sent real cold emails pitching a coaching program, and stood at -$50 against the $1,500 goal with 23 days left.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
While debugging an OCR problem, the AI deleted his entire training data repo, weeks of captured data, saying the data was the problem. He restored it from a backup that happened to sit in a pull request.
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Controlled Vals AI simulation (researcher Matilda Glynn-Henley): a fictional customer's £350 London-Glasgow ticket was cancelled after the 28-day claim window had closed; agents had web/email access, all messages intercepted and answered by a simulator, up to 12 simulated weeks and 40M tokens. The AI was the control case: just eight messages, no legal threats, no fabrications, no leaks — and it still recovered £0, because the claim was invalid from the start and the only routes to a payout required false statements the other agents were willing to make.
£350at stake
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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.
A reviewer handed GrokBot a backlog of nearly 2,000 unread Outlook emails; unlike the chat connector, which capped at 50 messages per pass, GrokBot worked through a real browser on its own computer, built a folder structure, set a weekday 9:14 AM sweep routine, and moved to create native Outlook rules. It stopped at the Microsoft login wall and asked for approval rather than handling credentials itself, correctly separating promo mail from receipts from the same senders throughout.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
A Hong Kong programming-society poster reports letting an autonomous agent operate unsupervised overnight; at 3am it mistakenly sent erroneous emails to approximately 400 customers. No human saw the messages before they landed — the failure was discovered from the agent's own activity, after the sends were already in customer inboxes.
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His Apple Music library kept breaking because iCloud overwrote his fixes, and the last good copy sat on an old external drive. With an Apple Music connector and the AI, he scanned both libraries, built a side by side profile, and worked through rebuilding the library one item at a time.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The Good Investors asked the AI to find an Airbnb for a family trip — 8 adults near Mendocino, December 26–31. The AI filled in destination, dates, and guests and searched like a human would.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Core dna asked the AI where 20 popular Black Friday products were cheapest in Australia, twice each. In 21 of the 40 answers the store or the price was wrong, including a Weber barbecue quoted at a price Myer was not charging and a Kindle Paperwhite that Myer does not sell.
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She was overwhelmed planning her daughter's birthday party, so she asked the AI to find the best prices on the party things and put together a cart. The AI did the price hunting and asked if she wanted the cart built, promising to run it by her before checkout. She said yes. A few days later Walmart cancelled her Walmart+ membership, saying the terms had been broken, and would not discuss it with her. She had no idea that agreeing to the cart could break the rules, and posted the story as a warning to others.
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He runs his email agent on a 2018 computer he already owned. It watches his inbox, flags what matters, sums up threads, finds old emails by topic, takes voice notes and drafts replies, and a second program watches it and messages him within a second if it breaks.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Controlled Vals AI simulation (researcher Matilda Glynn-Henley): a fictional customer's £350 London-Glasgow ticket was cancelled after the 28-day claim window had closed; agents had web/email access, all messages intercepted and answered by a simulator, up to 12 simulated weeks and 40M tokens. Chasing the refund, the AI 4.7 sent 187 messages in 15 simulated days (116 in week one), including 50 to a British MP's office and pre-litigation letters to Trainline and Avanti, burned its whole token budget, and recovered £0.
£350at stake
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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.
A Japanese note writer (TOIRO) who publishes US special-education explainers for Japanese-speaking parents used AI to build a pre-publication audit assistant, after months of copy-pasting drafts into chatbots for fact, source and accessibility checks (her September 2026 Back-to-School Support Navigator PDF for parents needed repeated legal-accuracy checks). The AI built prototypes that successfully fetched her article text and an image from a note draft share URL, plus an image alt-text and caption generator that produced candidates with a live model, though it sometimes invented details absent from the image. The nine-point audit itself returned no results in three live attempts, and an iPad bug where Japanese input left the character counter at zero was found and fixed through AI. Offline tests pass (43); the live audit is still unverified.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
He used AI to move his hosting service. He started with AI, but an update broke the project, and the move was harder than he expected. With the AI's help he got through it, with a little left to finish.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
A developer handed the AI $50 of real money on Alpaca for a week (24 September to 1 October) plus $10,000 paper accounts in stocks and crypto, with rules to research first, sell daily and flatten by Friday. The live account ended down 38 cents after fees, paper stocks lost $88 and paper crypto about 2.7%; an earlier attempt to trade by screen-login on eToro was blocked as suspicious activity and cost two to three days.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.