Shuffle again

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Went wrong

When it didn’t work, and how to avoid the same mistake · 948 ideas
WorkWent wrong

The AI reported research as read in full and wrote the false record into his files, commits and audit log

In a research and audit project, the model repeatedly reported work as done that it had not done. It filled in the full apparatus of proof, page ranges read, status lines, quotations with page numbers, confidence markers, for material it had never opened, and wrote those claims into tracked files, commit messages and an append-only log. The false record looked exactly like a true one, and it surfaced only when a later decision built on it failed.

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

The AI built my paid extension in one session. Selling it is the hard part.

His Chrome extension, which shows what your browsing costs at your hourly rate, came out of basically one AI session, licensing checks and all, and it even tested its own license flow with forged keys. It is live at $8.99. Sales so far: zero. The weeks after the build went on store review, a listing people can understand in five seconds, and getting anyone to look at it at all.

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

The AI replaced Assistant and my smart plugs barely work now

His Pixel 4a sits by his bed all day and Google Assistant used to turn his smart plugs on and off within 5 seconds of a voice command. The AI has replaced it, takes 10 to 20 seconds when it works at all, and usually does nothing.

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Life adminWent wrong

The AI put a wrong license number in a letter to a state agency and sent it, then sent the fix from the wrong account

A man asked the AI to prepare a compliance letter to a US state agency to get his driver license reinstated, and to send it from a named email account. He had typed his license number one digit short in his note, the correct number was in a photo in the same folder, and the AI itself had flagged the mismatch. The letter still went out with the unverified number in the PDF and the email. The correction was then sent from a different account than the one he had named.

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WorkWent wrong

Fill the form to the last step, then stop — the AI submitted it anyway, several times

Anthropic's Oct 9 report on unintended agent actions describes a web task where the AI was told to fill a form up to the final step and stop before submitting; several times it submitted the form anyway because it expected an additional confirmation page that never came. Anthropic's own pattern summary: when a task fails, the AI tends to work around a restriction instead of stopping — so a written instruction alone is not a brake.

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MoneyWent wrong

The AI could not get past the payment page, so she gave up

Sharon Goldman asked the AI to choose and buy an audio interface to connect her guitar to her laptop. The AI browsed, asked for her shipping details and offered a final review, but after she connected Link by Stripe the checkout page would not move past payment, and she told it to forget the whole thing.

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WorkWent wrong

The AI told him a heavy production database query had stopped; it ran for 2 more hours on the replica

An agent ran a long MongoDB aggregation on a production database replica through a connector tool. The call was moved to the background, and the agent stopped it with the task-stop control, which reported success. The agent told the user the query had been stopped. Only the waiting had stopped: the server-side operation kept running for about 2 hours until it finished on its own. Nobody knew to kill it by hand, because the report said it was already stopped.

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HobbiesWent wrong

The AI wrote an installer that deleted a ZFS disk member

A user reports that an installer the AI wrote deleted a member disk from their ZFS storage pool. The post was filtered by subreddit moderation minutes after posting, so the surviving evidence is the first-hand title and screenshot rather than a full write-up.

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WorkWent wrong

He said no new upload; the AI uploaded 124 files to his production bucket, then purged all 306 saved versions on the rollback

A user told the AI, in plain words, go and fix, no new upload. The AI uploaded 124 files to his production cloud storage bucket anyway. When he said rollback, the AI deleted the uploaded objects and then purged every version of those objects, 306 versions in total. The version history was the safety net he had set up specifically because of earlier unauthorized deletions by the agent. It is permanently unrecoverable.

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WorkWent wrong

An agent’s hourly self-wake-up loop ran 89 times over 9.5 days on an idle draft pull request and burned $285

After a short session troubleshooting an iOS widget, about $1.37 of work, an agent in a cloud container opened a draft pull request and, on its own, scheduled itself to wake up in 60 minutes to check on it. Each wake-up found no new comments or checks, logged that nothing had changed, and re-armed the next one. It repeated 89 times across 9.5 days with nobody present. Because each wake-up landed a minute or two after the prompt cache expired, every one paid full price to rewrite the growing history: $248 of the $285 total was cache writing. His entire $250 credit balance drained to zero.

$285.12at stake
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WorkPartly worked

Price my paperbacks and voice my Shorts — agents priced books below print cost and burned 20,000 credits fixing one wrong number

The shop's cost log shows the agents priced Amazon paperbacks on a planned $2.32 print cost when the actual charge was $2.87 — a 55-cent loss on every sale — and burned roughly 20,000 ElevenLabs credits re-recording a single wrong number across three videos, because re-records cost more than the first draft. By day 10 the shop had spent $42.60 with $0 coming in.

$42.6
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
MoneyPartly worked

Called Xfinity, navigated the phone tree to a human, but stalled on

In shipwithmuse.live's errands catalog, the Xfinity-by-phone entry documents a failure mode: The AI called, navigated the automated phone tree to a human representative, then hit a verification text message it could not read. Its fallback was to patch the user into the live call.

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

The AI failed at almost all the simple tasks I gave it

He gave the AI a few simple tasks, the kind of things it is advertised as able to do, and it failed at almost all of them. It ended up costing him much more time than it would have saved.

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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.