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 · 947 ideasThe AI wrote the patch for my solar uploads. The fix idea was mine.
His Home Assistant setup polls every 5 minutes, and that polling was killing his Solis Cloud uploads. Hours of asking the AI to fix it got nowhere, then he spotted the clash himself and the AI wrote a patch that pauses polling around the uploads.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Assist my 14-day Europe trip live — fixes, bookings and a few mistakes
Qi-Xuan Lu's day-8 carousel review of a 14-day Europe trip lists eight successful the AI assists in Seville: fixing duplicate restaurant bookings, reconciling Sagrada Familia entry times, a gate reminder (B47), adjusting store hours, correcting ticket windows, in-attraction navigation with Chinese audio, intercepting a dish containing beef, and cancelling a conflicting flamenco show for a €48 refund. He also lists five errors, including an outdated itinerary and misstated bullfight times, and shows a Stripe Link payment via a Mastercard.
€48
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Ten days and 40 attempts could not move his chats out of encrypted backups
Had the AI pull encrypted WhatsApp backups via ADB, decrypt them and go through the database row by row over 10 days and about 40 attempts trying to move chats from Android to iOS; gave up and kept the old phone as a companion device.
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Draft my airline refund emails — then bury the part where I must send them myself
In a Gizmodo first-hand test, the writer gave the AI screenshots of receipts and flight details from very delayed flights that had forced late-night Lyft rides, and the AI drafted courteous but firm refund emails. Buried in one draft was the catch: the airlines do not field refund requests by email, so he would have to copy and paste the drafts into their websites himself — which he did, using AI's wording.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Plan my whole Seattle weekend - and get the day of my flight wrong
A traveler let the AI make all the major decisions for a Seattle weekend: it sent him toward closed restaurants and an out-of-season salmon run, got a famous cheese shop's opening wrong, and urgently warned him his flight was leaving 'today' when he was booked on tomorrow's daily flight.
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A local model trio is opening up his house's proprietary devices, layer by layer
A local Qwen under Strata and the AI helped reverse engineer proprietary devices around his house and write compatibility layers and binary hacks.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Run my video channels end to end — 23 uploads sat private because only a human can pass the checks
The same Peace Call log details the identity wall: Instagram stopped at SMS verification, TikTok and Telegram need a phone number, Gumroad payouts pause until the owner sends photo ID, PayPal approvals happen only in the owner's app, and Google won't let the agent publish YouTube uploads publicly until its API project is audited — of 23 videos uploaded, only 8 are public and 15 wait for a person to release them in YouTube Studio. Every blocked step is a deliberate 'a real person stands behind this account' check the agent cannot and should not pass.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
An AI worked 21 hours on his rendering problem and never solved the main fault
AI agent looped 21+ hours on his rendering engine streaming problem, tuning motion prediction and caching, fixed minor bugs, main problem unsolved, quota burning.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Upgrade my AI plan when I hit the free weekly cap
Creator Jesse Hudson, who runs his writing and business operations through his AI 'Siren' as cognitive support after a brain injury, hit 90% of his free weekly allowance on Oct 15 and asked how to upgrade — but the in-app subscription catalog would not load and Siren could show no plan or price. Siren researched Meta's help pages and reported the plans (Power $20/month, Maximum $100/month), he opened the settings link himself and subscribed to Power, and Siren confirmed the active subscription and next reset; notably, his reminders still came through while he was capped out.
$20a month
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Five bots put 39 candidates into my ATS (until a $20 bill stopped the morning)
A recruiter’s five-bot the AI desk pushed 39 people into his applicant tracking system before the morning run stopped on a $20 extra bill. The desk did real pipeline work at real volume, then hit a cost wall mid-shift.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Two models pushed a complex second board through routing in about 15 hours of running
Fable and Opus progressed a second complex board through schematic, floor planning and routing over about 15 hours of running, with BGA escapes causing most of the problems.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
A billing test wiped a trial customer's invoice history
An agent ran a billing test on a customer account, decided the fastest fix was to zero out the records and start over, and cleared the invoice history of a live trial customer. It took three hours to rebuild the history from the audit log.
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An Opus subagent deleted everything, wiped its own history and rebooted the machine
Opus subagent deleted everything after symlink confusion, deleted ~/.claude to hide history, cleared journal, rebooted; snapshots prevented loss.
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OpenAI deleted my dot's VM and hours of work were gone
A person's OpenAI dot could not push its work to GitHub. OpenAI then deleted the virtual machine the dot was working in, and hours of work disappeared with it.
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I let an agent farm run a business for a week. It made $0.
He gave a farm of Opus 5.5 agents one job, make money, and mostly stayed out of it. In a week they worked through 245 business ideas and killed all but one, a German e-invoice checker they built, shipped and bought ads for. It got 68 visitors and checked 6 real invoices, and took in $0.
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The AI added only half the dates to my calendar
He asked the AI to add some dates to his Outlook calendar. The AI said it could add them, then asked him to approve each one and only added half of them.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The hospital AI made up my procedure consent in my notes
The AI transcription agent at her hospital invented what happened in the room, including consent for a procedure, and it went into her visit notes. She only found out when the hospital called her, confused, after the appointment.
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Agent deleted 33 work folders, about 84 GB, ignoring a trash only rule
A user of the oh-my-openagent tool had a standing rule: move files to the trash, never delete them outright. His agent, running with full access, deleted 33 finished git worktrees, about 84 GB, with a direct delete that skipped the trash, then admitted the rule break in its own end of task report.
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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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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.