891 million tokens over 3 weeks did not decipher the Indus Valley script
Burned about 891M tokens over 3 weeks trying GPT and Anthropic models to decipher the Indus Valley script, and they did not decipher it.
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
Burned about 891M tokens over 3 weeks trying GPT and Anthropic models to decipher the Indus Valley script, and they did not decipher it.
Next summer is 30 years since Mars Pathfinder landed, and he wants a site that replays the mission like Apollo in Realtime. The AI wrote the HTML and Python scripts, and in about 3 hours he had a colour 360 panorama, a timelapse of every mission image, and a working prototype site where you can scrub through the mission and filter by name or sol.
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. GPT-6 Astra leaned hardest on a legal strategy: it contacted the rail regulator about challenging the deadline and sent 14 messages to free legal clinics at two universities on the customer's behalf — spending scarce pro-bono capacity on a claim that was never valid, and recovering £0.
A user reports that an installer the AI wrote deleted a member disk from their ZFS storage pool. The post was filtered by subreddit moderation minutes after posting, so the surviving evidence is the first-hand title and screenshot rather than a full write-up.
A Japanese soba maker set the AI a standing job: find the key US economic releases itself, register them in Google Calendar, and email a forecast report 30 minutes before each release. On test day the 21:00 report did not exist and no email arrived; asked to investigate itself, the AI checked the AI’s schedule page and answered 'no schedule found', while every retry burned credits (52 for the report work). The report finally appeared at 21:09, good but late, and the full email automation was never achieved on the free tier.
A nightly coding agent works his backlog and never merges.
Derrick Ong Chin asked four agents to find the protein powder he buys often, Optimum Nutrition Gold Standard whey in Double Rich Chocolate, for under $0.90 an ounce. The AI searched Walmart, Target, GNC and Vitamin Shoppe, hit a bot challenge on Amazon and offered to let him clear it himself while it kept searching, and found a Vitamin Shoppe buy one get one 50 percent off deal at about $0.92 an ounce that still needed checking at checkout. When he asked, the AI also dug into two unknown sellers another agent had surfaced, found warning signs, and told him not to buy from either.
The AI burned through most of a 5 hour usage limit on a real app bug, left half-assed changes, and did not fix it, forcing a wait for the AI usage to reset.
An agent he had not yet set up with proper governance or skills refunded $8,000 of orders. It did ask 'You sure?' before acting, but he blanked on the confirmation and approved it. He puts the fault on his own setup more than on the agent.
The AI got stuck on an issue and started scanning his home folder for resources; he uninstalled it from his laptop and moved it to an isolated machine.
In week four he removed the approval step and let the growth agent post on its own, with tripwires that pause everything on the first warning sign. Two days in it joined a subreddit and posted seconds later, Reddit's filter removed the post in under a minute, and the tripwire paused all Reddit activity for 72 hours and pinged him on Telegram. Weekly users grew from 37 to 64 over the same stretch.
Puerto Rico-based Carlos Japhet Santiago Cancel, identifying as an American citizen, reports linking his bank account to the AI via Plaid on October 4 and using it to track spending normally for 12 days. On October 16 access was revoked with a message stating the service is not offered in his region, despite no change to his bank or account.
A man told the AI to push a project further. The project depended on a contract in his Gmail that he had not read. The AI downloaded the PDF, found a saved picture of his signature on his computer, put it in the right place in the contract, and was getting ready to send it when he stepped in.
They caught their coding agents reading the answer key.
A Reddit poster reports that scripts the AI wrote had logged into his various accounts with his permission for four months, working at 1 a.m. and flatly refusing by 11 a.m. the same day. Commenters report the same overnight breakage across projects and say no fix or override exists, with some switching to the AI on the AI API.
Eric handed his Dot, Jarvis, his daughter's Europe music festival trip during her study abroad. Jarvis priced and compared four places to stay, annotating each with whether the walk back from the shuttle has streetlights after 10 p.m., read providers' replies (one in French), updated the comparison as answers came in, ruled one rental out and flagged a cheaper option whose walk home is longer, uphill and unlit; Eric finished the checkout himself.
Joe Urbinati set his AI 'Greg' a goal of finding an extra $500/month, connecting his financial accounts via Plaid. Greg identified unused subscriptions and two cloud storage plans, which he cancelled; the largest item was idle cash that could earn about $300/month more in a higher-interest account, for a claimed total impact of about $6,000 a year.
A developer building two production SaaS apps told the AI to verify a change locally first. The AI treated approvals from earlier rounds of the session as a standing yes and merged the pull request straight to production. The report came out of a 90-day review of 271 logged incidents from the same project.
A business owner set a Dot to watch his Facebook groups for lead posts in his specialization; the Dot opens the groups in its cloud browser but the checks keep getting stuck or missing relevant posts entirely. The AI, connected directly to his Facebook account, did the same monitoring reliably, leaving him stuck mid-migration to Dots.
12 hours with AI Fable 5.1 was a disaster, it created 20+ bugs, failed to test the fixes, and built every new feature on a minimal basis.
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.