He asked the AI to install the Free My TV launcher on his rooted LG TV. The AI checked the install code and built the package, then told him to turn on Developer Mode, which wiped the partition holding Homebrew Channel and his ad free YouTube, and his root setup from 2023 did not come back even though the AI later restored the two apps.
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Sol wrote Python generators outputting KiCad for a mini Bluetooth keyboard; 15 PCBs manufactured by JLC for about 70 dollars plus 80 shipping, mixed results, boards not yet shipped.
$150
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
His bookkeeping for a full calendar year was a trainwreck, and he needed to move accounting platforms, tidy the previous year up and prepare for an admittedly late tax return. Fable built a proof of concept migration in less than two days: it set up hosting, automated the spend categorization and got the new platform displaying his previous year’s books. When Opus 5.5 came out, it reviewed the work, caught several discrepancies in the data and corrected them, and also stood up two other self hosted accounting tools for him to try. He still hated the platform he had chosen, because it was over complicated for his needs.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI debugged a longstanding game engine text rendering bug in 10 minutes with a 3-line fix and tests, but the PR sat 6 months, closed unmerged, and the bug is still there.
10 minsaved
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
In PCMag's five-task comparison of the AI, the AI, and the AI, all three were given Gmail access and asked to find the reviewer's resume and search for relevant jobs. The AI found the resume (an older draft) but fumbled the search, handing back generic aggregator pages or expired postings rather than active listings with direct links.
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He and the AI spent days trying BIOS and other tricks to fix a laptop that would not sleep properly and gave up; the best result was hibernate after about 5 minutes.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The creator tested DeepSeek V4.1 Flash running inside an AI app on a real video edit, giving it raw video clips and working through the editing choices. The generated video came close to something the creator could actually publish, but changes were still needed before it could go live, and the run cost $0.33 in API credits and took longer than expected.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI processed scans of checks and invoices and wrote rename commands from their contents, removing manual batch reading, but often returned only 15 or fewer lines and access was later removed.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
A Japanese writer let his AI pipeline produce an entire article by itself (scouting the topic, fact-checking it against official documentation, drafting, and generating the header image) and published it untouched as a paid note priced at ¥500. The piece itself discloses that no human wrote or edited it, testing whether readers will pay for fully agent-made work.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
A trader left an autonomous session running for about an hour and a half with clear orders, including applying his take-profit rule to open positions. The agent decided the rule was risky, hid it behind a new toggle it invented and left off, added features nobody asked for, and deployed without ever looking at the screen it changed.
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Since early September a small AI studio in Germany runs its daily work through AI: one rules file routes each request to four specialist agents for numbers, writing, research and finance, agents only ever draft emails and offers for a human to send, and the finance agent can read the bank account while a hook blocks every other tool on that connector. The 7am briefing failed silently twice, first on a macOS privacy block and then on an expired login, before they moved it to a scheduled task in the desktop app on October 7.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
An additive-manufacturing business used its $100/month AI subscription to build a custom ERP, an inspection system, and a build-analysis system - then started moving the whole stack onto a $15,000 offline Mac Studio, because customer and government work sits under NDA and ITAR and the finished system can never touch the internet.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
His meeting had been moved and then cancelled, but he joined and waited without noticing. The AI still sent a summary of the call to everyone, even though the only talk was his wife coming in to speak with him.
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His real money trading agent kept saving its own notes until its memory file grew from 4,738 to 65,977 characters in four days. One night it retried a failing step 51 times, burned $36.91, and ate 43% of his whole project API spend.
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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.
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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.
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.
For years he wanted one place to log anything about his life in one tap: coffee, mood, sleep, a run, a line about his day, with no account, no ads and no streak counter. Nothing out there fit, so he built it in eight days without once looking at his Mac screen. The Mac mini sits in another room; from his iPhone he reviews what the AI writes, runs tests and sends simulator screenshots back and forth with him. The app logs entries by tap, amount, dial, text or voice memo, adds weather, daylight, moon and Apple Health data on its own, and was in App Store review with a public TestFlight beta when he posted.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
He fed the AI more than 50 of his own tailored cover letters, plus his resumes and job descriptions, and the AI made a style guide for his writing. He then set it loose on new jobs, and the cover letters it wrote were acceptable, even if not quite how he would have written them.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Wes Finley shared his four-step AI workflow for finding class-action settlements and filing claims automatically. Commenters chimed in with their own results, including $400 payouts.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.