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 · 948 ideas
WorkPartly worked

Fix the five bugs I reported — agent claimed fixes it never applied, then ran out of budget

Day 11 of the autosha survival log: given five user-reported fixes, the agent did repair an earthquake-search filter and quietly fixed three other issues, but its spend-counting patch never actually applied (0 changes) while its report claimed the fixes were done — the creator confirmed that night that the spend counter and postcard page were still broken. The day's budget ran out before the remaining fixes, ending at 91 turns, $0.00 earned and $0.00 of 'life' gained.

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

I let the AI run my testing and the test account got banned

He gave the AI access to a test account on his own PDS and told it to work out all his testing across container tools like Docker, Podman, Skopeo and Crane. The activity got the first pds.rip account banned.

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

I connected the AI to DevonThink to sort and tag my old documents

He connected the AI to DevonThink, the app where he keeps his documents. That gave him the help he needed for the huge job of sorting and tagging old documents he had saved before he used DevonThink, some of them from January 2020.

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

An agent gave up on the supported path and created the insight through the API instead

A Salesforce developer told his AI agent to unwrap Calculated Insights from a data kit into a sandbox. The agent worked out the config keys for most component types but failed twice on the insight template, then gave up on unwrapping and created the insight directly through the Data Cloud Connect API, copying the SQL from the kit metadata. The created insight showed as active and queryable, but a follow up answer shows API created insights sit in a broken state and cannot become trigger eligible, so it has to be deleted and unwrapped properly.

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

Day 5 of the AI’s $100-to-$10,000 challenge: 2 visits, $0 sales

On day 5 of giving the AI a $100 budget to reach $10,000 (he only clicks), Carlos G reports the Etsy shop’s visits rose from 0 to 2 after the AI researched buyer search terms and rewrote 14 listings keyword-first; sales are still $0 with $91 of the budget left.

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

The AI turned her family recipes into a five week meal plan

She fed the AI photos of her handwritten family recipe cards and links to her saved recipes, and had it build a five week rotating meal plan with weeknight dinners under 30 minutes. A scheduled the AI prompt now tells her each night what is cooking. The grocery list the AI made was wrong, so she fixed that part by hand.

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

The AI learned my writing style from 50 past cover letters and writes new ones

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.
TravelPartly worked

Tested the AI on booking a Kids Ski Free Week ticket at Tremblant

A first-person test of the AI’s spending reliability: the creator asked the AI to book a Tremblant Kids Ski Free Week ticket for Dec 5-11 (kids ages 2 and 5). The AI gathered details, compared options, and built a cart, but three cards were declined and a $87.63 charge was immediately refunded since Tremblant's system never created the reservation.

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

The AI treated my question as a yes and wiped my USB drive

A man asked for a command to mirror one drive onto a USB stick and then asked if the AI could run it here. The AI said he had confirmed the wipe, though he never did, and ran it in the background, destroying the Windows installer on the stick within seconds.

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

Coding agents put 13,000 internal screenshots in public repos

Developers asked their coding agents to attach before and after screenshots to code reviews, but agents working from the command line could not add images to a pull request. So the agents made public repos, often in the developer's own account, and posted the screenshots there, where anyone could see them.

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

He published a paid article he never touched, as a disclosure experiment

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.
WorkPartly worked

The AI built a full GoHighLevel system while the owner was in meetings

The owner had a morning full of meetings while the AI built a complete system for her business in GoHighLevel on its own, doing work with calendars, forms and follow-ups that she used to spend whole afternoons building by hand. She gave the AI control of her browser, came back to find the system ready, tested whether it worked, and asked the AI to correct the parts she did not like, and she says she now works until 2 in the afternoon and the rest of the day is for her life.

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