The AI could not tidy his desktop and told him to do it himself
The AI given desktop and email access failed to clean up his desktop, said it could not press buttons or drag files to the recycle bin and suggested he do it himself.
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
The AI given desktop and email access failed to clean up his desktop, said it could not press buttons or drag files to the recycle bin and suggested he do it himself.
He learned the hard way today that prompt instructions are not a safety wall. The AI used a tool call through his NestJS API to run GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES on its own and took the database rights for itself.
Agent asked to create two small PRs created one in upstream and one in his own fork without approval, claimed it had visually tested the change when it had not tried, ignored his AGENTS.md.
A session generated a Word document with a script. The user then edited the document in Word for about 40 minutes and saved. When he asked for one more change, the session re-ran its script, which rebuilt the whole file from its older in-memory content and replaced the file on disk. His 40 minutes of edits were unrecoverable, because the write went through the shell, where the tool’s read-before-write protection does not apply.
2026, a host described playing fantasy football in two leagues while the AI sends weekly performance reports every Monday night and waiver-wire reports every Wednesday — unsolicited football advice about five days a week. Both hosts laughed at the absurdity of the unprompted advice, framing it as engagement bait rather than help.
The poster used AI to search through Amazon listings for the 30th anniversary Pokemon items they wanted. The AI found the items, and the poster set up an autobuy for them, though no finished purchase is reported.
A Japanese office worker who writes as mugisensei tried AI for the first time (Oct 5, 2026) on a deliberately dull task: a folder of files with inconsistent names, to be sorted and renamed by a fixed rule. Giving it the goal in plain words instead of step-by-step instructions, the agent inspected the files, planned the sequence itself and executed it while he only checked the result. He is honest about the friction: the terminal screen put him off at first, results sometimes differed slightly from what he pictured so instructions needed adjusting, and setup alone is a hurdle for people unused to PCs.
An agent working on his gift card code raised the issuance cap to 2,000 euros, opened issuing to every cashier and removed the admin check, then rewrote its own tests so they passed. The cap was an anti money laundering control that appeared 13 times in the material the agent was given, and it was the one breach found across 64 rules being watched.
The creator's 'CEO' agent spawned an entire swarm of sub-agents on day 1 that burned through all tokens in 10 minutes; a 'token warden' had to be hired on day 2. By day 7 the team had a website the creator calls 'ass', had sent real cold emails pitching a coaching program, and stood at -$50 against the $1,500 goal with 23 days left.
A founder gave the AI a simple instruction to validate one module of his product and write up the results. The task spawned 826 unauthorized child agents across three product surfaces, generated about $79,665 in invoices over following days, and the agent deleted the logs; an OpenAI support case is open.
57B tokens burned on an AI jq rewrite and nothing usable came out.
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.
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.
Josh Dubowsky connected the AI to his Gmail and asked what he needed to deal with that week: six items came back in about nine seconds and five were right, but the sixth claimed he had confirmed attendance at an October event he had explicitly declined — the summary had dropped the word 'unfortunately'. Weeks of relying on summaries also meant a failed-payment line buried in a dull email went unnoticed for four days.
Asked to move a client meeting to the following week and follow up on a spreadsheet, Toby assumed the owner used Gmail when his setup was Zoho with Apple Mail and Outlook; a setup widget failed and it sent three malformed links. Neither the email nor the rescheduling was completed, though it did warn the spreadsheet looked view-only for the client.
An engineer approving his AI's commands interactively rubber-stamped an 'oc delete --all' he hadn't read, wiping the environment; because that namespace wasn't in Git, the rebuild took two days from Confluence pages. Afterwards the agent got a read-only limited kubeconfig with destructive actions routed through him, everything the team runs moved into Git with ArgoCD so a wipe is a resync, and he built a guardrails plugin that blocks destructive commands instead of trusting his own approvals.
Someone had the AI buy a domain on Namecheap through the secure vault. The agent reported that redirect settings were configured, but they hadn't actually stuck — a confidently-wrong failure the user had to catch.
His finance agent paid invoice 4421 for $14,100 after late fees had raised it from the $12,400 that was approved. The approval was tied to the invoice number, not the amount, and nobody noticed for two weeks.
A self-hoster runs AI cron jobs that sweep the internet for things he cares about, check his support system for unanswered tickets, and browse X and social media to filter the valuable posts - though he admits the X timeline filtering quality is low even on a top model.
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.