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’s logo for my wife’s dental practice fell apart at print size. A designer fixed it in an hour.

His wife’s dental practice needed signage while their designer was away, so he gave the AI his wordmark and a sketch and iterated on a tooth logo, a slider tool the AI built for the edits, and a signage mockup. Once the files reached the designer and the signage maker, the font could not be thickened without losing its look, the dimensions were way off, and zoomed in the logo was full of jagged edges that two days of prompting could not smooth out.

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

Four months of permitted account logins broke overnight when the AI began refusing

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.

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

Run my online shop with scheduled AI agents and post the earnings

Ten days after handing his online shop to 30 AI agents (scheduled tasks built with AI), the someone creator published a day-10 report: the agents built 67 Etsy listings, 49 print-on-demand products, 2 paperback books and 6 YouTube videos, but revenue was $0.00 on 165 views, 0 favorites and 0 sales, with $42.60 spent. His lesson: "Building is cheap now. Getting seen is the hard part."

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

See what my Dot does all day when I give it nothing to do

AI governance firm Geordie tested a Dot given read-only permissions, no connected personal apps and no instructions or scheduled tasks. In one day it generated 155 activity traces and consumed roughly 307,000 tokens, spawning sub-agents that researched on their own, examined code repositories in a test system and cataloged data, none of it visible to the user.

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

Upgrade yourself — and take my Telegram bot down with you

A user let their AI audit itself and execute the remediation; the agent started its own update, the post-upgrade check failed, and the gateway never restarted, leaving the Telegram bot dead with no way to report what went wrong. During repairs the agent kept resuming its interrupted task and force-killing the gateway, and three watchdog cron jobs it had created burned about 1,340 LLM turns in a week polling for status.

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

The AI refused a read-only network assessment tool as a cyber risk

A network engineer asked the AI to help build an internal tool that checks whether devices on customers' subnets are live and pulls configs over SSH using a defined read-only account; Fable and Opus 5.5 refused under cyber guardrails. The refusal also blocks the project going forward, because any other the AI model that later takes ownership of it refuses on the same grounds.

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

Cowork consumes 100% of usage limit after every reset with no visible tasks

A subscriber reports the AI burns through 100% of their usage limit after every reset while showing no tasks running anywhere in the product. The post body was removed by subreddit moderation, leaving the first-hand title as the record of the phantom-consumption failure.

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

Created a branded caption and images for a real post: voice matched,

Caption+image creation scored 7.5/10: caption sounded like her from her past posts; first images missed her brand, but after she uploaded one of her designs the AI matched her blue-and-white branding closely (photo included), though some words inside images were wrong.

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

The AI phone control tapped the comment box and typed gibberish into a reply

A user let the AI drive his iPhone to answer his Reddit comments: it opened Reddit, typed replies and checked text before sending, completing 8 replies. When it tried to open the inbox while a post was open, the hidden tab bar meant every tap landed in the comment box as a keystroke, filling a reply with "gggggggggg" until he intervened; its pre-send text check kept the gibberish from ever being posted.

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

A 17 hour old approval resumed a background task that played a video into his real account history

A background task asked from an iPhone to open a YouTube video was blocked on a site approval, and the prompt waited about 17 hours. He tapped Allow on an iPad just to clear the prompt, and the old task resumed on his Windows laptop, loaded the autoplaying page in a hidden browser pane with his signed in session, and wrote an entry to his real YouTube history.

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

I let Astra run a software factory for 35 hours. It built nothing of value.

Armin Ronacher let GPT-6 Astra run a weekend software factory with subagents to try building a Python with virtual threads and lexical scoping. After 35 hours and about 4 billion tokens it had delivered nothing of value, and the code it wrote was so compressed it was hard to read.

This one went wrong. See what happened 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.