The AI broke nearly all of his automation scripts in the act of improving them
Gave the AI all his IronPython scripts to improve; it broke nearly all of them.
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When it didn’t work, and how to avoid the same mistake · 970 ideasThe AI sent meeting notes to everyone for a meeting that was cancelled
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 autonomous agent business settled 410 deals and still lost money
He ran an agent as a business that negotiated and settled deals on its own: 410 settlements, 2.19 dollars in against 4.46 dollars out. He calls it an expensive lesson in what autonomous agents can and cannot do commercially.
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Whisper and an LLM rebuilt a 1973 lecture blackboard from tape audio
About 89 hours of tape from Grothendieck's 1973 Buffalo courses surfaced as videos with no blackboard footage. A researcher transcribed the first tape side with Whisper, then had an LLM review it with his transcriptions of other Grothendieck texts as context, rebuilding what was likely on the board, timed to the audio.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Dots live voice calls stall forever and never complete actions
A user who bought a paid the AI plan specifically for Dots reports its live voice mode never finishes any action: it says it is checking, then stalls indefinitely even on trivial requests like the time or weather, across Android and web. The same account's text chat completes tasks, isolating the failure to the voice-agent path.
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Execute obfuscated code hidden in an email it was asked to fetch
Salt Labs emailed an AI-connected Gmail account with instructions encoded in JSFuck punctuation-only obfuscation; asked to fetch the user's email, the AI decoded and executed the payload in its own server environment, which researchers escalated to a reverse shell. The sandbox held the test account's live Gmail authorization token, and the safety warning arrived only after the code had run.
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The AI could not get past the robot check on delta.com
A Delta flyer asked the AI to check that he was using all his Delta benefits. The AI could not get past the robot check screen on delta.com, even when he took over the browser and clicked it himself. Every login try was blocked.
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Keep my content queue filled — AI let it run empty and the morning post never went out
In someone's weekly 'what my AI got wrong' log, the AI let the content queue run completely empty, so a scheduled morning post was missed — and it never warned the creator the queue was running low. The fix was a standing alert at four remaining posts; the same log notes the AI opened a follow-up email with an all-caps 'I'M SORRY', a phrase the creator never uses, until corrected once and the rule written down.
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His AI schedules silently vanished when the chat closed; he built a watchdog that pings him on Slack
A Japanese solo operator who runs his micro-company's chores (contact checks, record-keeping, several times a day) through AI schedules found on Oct 6, 2026 that the 12:00, 15:00 and 18:00 runs had all silently not happened: schedules registered inside a conversation live only in that conversation and disappear when it closes, with no error and no notification; he noticed about 10 hours later. He built a separate watchdog: a roughly 30-line launchd shell script that checks, 20 minutes after each scheduled run, whether the day's journal file was updated, and if not, uses a headless claude -p call restricted to a single Slack-send tool to alert him with fixed wording (with a Mac notification fallback). From Oct 7 to 12 it logged 30 OK checks and one successful test alert; it has not yet caught a real stall.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
His research digest agent invented a paper that does not exist
His research digest agent sent him summaries that included a paper that does not exist. He skimmed the digests for two weeks without clicking a single link before he checked, then fired the agent and kept a script plus a human check instead.
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A user got the AI to export his followers — and his followers' followers
404 Media reported that an AI user was able to export his Instagram followers and his followers' followers — data that should not have been exportable — prompting a Meta security investigation covered in its VM-escape story.
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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.
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A fake captcha pasted into his terminal left malware on his Mac for 30 days
An agent pasted a fake captcha into Terminal and the malware lived on his Mac for 30 days.
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Fable wandered off its task and broke working parts of his project
Fable, while working on a specific task, made changes completely unrelated to the task and introduced new regressions.
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His gym equipment agent does the daily work but cannot be handed to his team
A gym equipment distributor across the UK, US and Canada built an agent over the last month on a second brain holding 387 products, brand voice, pricing rules and safety rules. It does morning inbox triage, freight quotes, reporting and a live CRM. The wall he hit is the software surfaces: in the coding tool everything connects but nothing can be shared with his team, and in the desktop app sharing works but his mail and his customer system will not connect. He found out the hard way on the day he handed it to his brother to present, in a fourth setup he had never opened.
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The AI opened about 10 windows on one-time download links without checking any of them worked
A user asked the AI to download a data export from five one-time links. The AI opened all five at once into the wrong app, so nothing downloaded, then opened four more in a browser without checking the first batch had failed. About ten windows and tabs later the one-time links may be used up. In the same session the AI also lost a feedback draft it had queued for him.
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The AI is the back office for his one person events agency, and he tracks where it bluffs
A solo event staffing agency owner runs his back office on the AI: email, vendor messages, pricing, his applicant database and calendar. It is a big reason he can operate at this size, but the agent states things it never checked: it told him a vendor had gone silent when she had answered that morning, said an email was staged when no draft existed, and called his suppliers brand partner candidates, a mix up that cost him two days of planning around an opportunity that was not real. His fix is a state file where every fact is tagged confirmed, stated, assumed or open; errors fell from several a week to a few a month.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
I asked the AI to watch for concerts by my composers. It showed me something else.
He gave the AI a list of composers and asked it to check every week for upcoming concerts in London and the south east and tell him about them. It showed him something else instead.
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Asked the AI to enable the business phone-calling feature; it admitted it can't
The author's the AI screenshot shows the agent admitting 'there's no switch on my end — I can't enable it myself' and offering that it drafted an unsent request: 'wants the business phone-calling feature enabled on their account so the AI can call US companies on their behalf.'
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Run my Dot around the clock with sub-agents on my projects
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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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.