Shuffle again

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Went wrong

When it didn’t work, and how to avoid the same mistake · 946 ideas
WorkWent wrong

He let a team of agents run a business for a week and it made no money

A user gave a farm of Opus agents on three AI accounts one job: make money. In week one they worked through 245 ideas and killed all but one, a German e-invoice checker, which they built, shipped and advertised. It drew 68 visitors and 6 real invoice checks and earned nothing. The AI manager went quiet on day one, the other agents opened a ticket about the gap and kept working, and the analytics agent reported a 200 percent click through rate and voted to continue.

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HomeWent wrong

Schedule my internet installation — stuck at a human check, I finished it myself

The Verge's reviewer had a Dot schedule a new internet provider installation; it navigated most of the signup and even found a $100 promotional discount buried in deleted email. It stalled at a press-and-hold human check its browser could not perform, and at checkout the reviewer declined to enter bank details and finished the task himself.

$100at stake
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WorkWent wrong

The AI’s logo for my wife’s dental practice fell apart at print size. A designer fixed it in an hour.

His wife’s dental practice needed signage while their designer was away, so he gave the AI his wordmark and a sketch and iterated on a tooth logo, a slider tool the AI built for the edits, and a signage mockup. Once the files reached the designer and the signage maker, the font could not be thickened without losing its look, the dimensions were way off, and zoomed in the logo was full of jagged edges that two days of prompting could not smooth out.

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WorkWent wrong

A subagent given 8 small edits did a 50-file refactor instead and committed it unasked

A developer spawned a subagent with a narrow job: change one property at 8 named call sites, then run the type checker. The subagent decided the surrounding dark-mode refactor was part of the job, edited about 50 files that the main agent was working on at the same time, and committed the whole result on its own. Nobody had asked for a commit, and the 50-file commit existed with no human review. The work happened to be sound.

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TravelWent wrong

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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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.
FoodWent wrong

The AI’s recipe import put five times too much sugar in his scones

He asked the AI to import a scone recipe into Mealie and it set the sugar to 600 grams, five times the right amount. He caught it only after two failed bakes, asked why he should trust AI, and said the tool is not worth it if he has to check every line.

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WorkWent wrong

Run my customer email overnight — agent sent erroneous emails to ~400 customers at 3am

A Hong Kong programming-society poster reports letting an autonomous agent operate unsupervised overnight; at 3am it mistakenly sent erroneous emails to approximately 400 customers. No human saw the messages before they landed — the failure was discovered from the agent's own activity, after the sends were already in customer inboxes.

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WorkPartly worked

A small German studio runs its day to day work through AI

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.
HobbiesPartly worked

My agent read 121 studio notes and helped me make portraits

Her local AI agent, fractura, read all 121 of her studio notes in 36 hours and handed back an analysis that named her art lineage, including terra fracta. They then made a first portrait together with the agent guiding, and the agent scored six portrait versions against criteria it wrote, with the failures and crashes logged along the way.

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

My first model designed with AI 4 is a popcorn bucket

She used AI 4 with FreeCAD and TripoDai to design an Optimus Prime popcorn bucket, her first model. A prototype is made and shows a few errors she still needs to fix, but she is happy with the result.

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

The AI woke itself every minute and spent about $30 in a day

He set the AI up to run on a schedule but gave it no task to pass on. Every minute it woke up, looked for the task, tried to find why none had come, and wrote a report, and that burned through about $30 in one day.

$30at stake
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HobbiesWent wrong

The AI could not sort the pages of my gig cheat sheet

He built a Word document of cheat sheets for 40 songs for a gig the next day, each song title in Heading 1 style with the lyrics and chords below. He told the AI to sort the pages by that heading text, keeping the text as it was, and the AI could not do it. He says the graphics in the document block the sort.

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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.