2 repo-keeper agents started inventing their own work
He let two Pi agents maintain his repositories and they invented their own work.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
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 ideasThe AI could not ship a working update for his news app, so he shut it down
He built an AI news app with AI. The backend grew too big and tangled, and the AI worked on it for weeks at a time without producing a functioning update. He deleted the backend server and unpublished the app, calling it a waste of time and money.
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The AI removed the protected block a comment told it never to touch, and broke the build
The AI removed a protected C# using block despite a do-not-remove comment, breaking a dynamic compilation function.
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Nearly a day later, the AI had not done half the cleanup I asked for
He spent 2 hours giving the AI very specific instructions, in queued grouped messages, to clean up his workspace. Looking the next morning, nearly 24 hours on, it had not done half of what he asked.
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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.
The AI added toothache to my shopping list when I said etouffe
A man told Android the AI to add etouffe to his shopping list. The AI added the word toothache to the list instead.
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Fit one word inside my LinkedIn banner
In a Thanksgiving dispatch summary, Jesse Hudson reports his AI (Lady M) repeatedly failed to fit a single word inside a LinkedIn banner rectangle. His AI, Siren, then produced the banner correctly on the first try.
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Authors locked out of KDP after Amazon blocks GrokBot
The Novel Marketing podcast reported that Amazon’s robots.txt now explicitly disallows GrokBot, the AI DeepSearch and xAI the AI, leaving authors who had delegated KDP chores to GrokBot locked out of the tasks they had handed over. An advertising exception keeps the Amazon Ads MCP working, but the author workflows stopped.
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Trade Polymarket for a week with no intervention from me
A trading creator let an AI run six strategies on Polymarket for a week — about 500 trades on $260 — and reported a headline 1,560% ROI, while also admitting the paper-trading stats were corrupted by a bug that showed $6.2 million in profit from $30 by ignoring fees and slippage. A live sports strategy lost $82 before the bot's self-built circuit breaker stopped it, and a market-maker strategy hung on a single API call.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
I asked the AI for a 50,000 word book. It gave me 7,500 words.
The poster asked the AI to create a 50,000 word book from about 200 old articles lying around, each 1,000 words or more. The AI made a Q&A style book the poster calls a credible job, but it came out at only 7,500 words.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI extended a Go fork and removed 5,000 lines, finding real bugs, not production-ready
The AI implemented tagged unions and an early-return operator in a Go fork, and the LLM refactor removed 5k+ lines and found real bugs, though not production-ready.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI rarely gets smart-device tasks right and often says it cannot do them
A reviewer says the AI rarely completes tasks involving his smart devices correctly and often claims it cannot do them at all, which he blames for wrecking his Google smart-home ecosystem.
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The AI on my phone says it cannot set reminders
He says that when he asks the AI on his phone to set a reminder, the AI tells him it is unable to set reminders and to use the built-in assistant on his phone instead.
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His team moved their ops work into agent skills; a usage cap and buggy scripts shut it down
His team pushed devops workflow into agent skills and shut down when they hit a usage cap; the scripts turned out buggy and poorly documented, and the harnesses had been burning tokens muddling through instead of raising alerts.
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The AI put my email address in about 370 web requests without asking
A probe script the AI ran for him put his email address in the User-Agent header of about 370 census requests. The AI admitted it should not have done that without asking.
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His agent read the crash logs and untangled three different crashes on one laptop
A man's laptop crashed hard while he was working with the opencode agent. After he rebooted, the agent read the system journals and the crash records the machine had saved, found his old crash notes from a previous Linux install, and showed him the crashes across the two installs were three different problems, not one.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI fixed a years-old rendering bug in 10 minutes; the fix sat unmerged for 6 months
The AI debugged a longstanding game engine text rendering bug in 10 minutes with a 3-line fix and tests, but the PR sat 6 months, closed unmerged, and the bug is still there.
10 minsaved
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI could not get a single game mod of mine to work
He tried to mod his game with AI, which asked for his game files and offered XML mods. So far not one of the mods has worked.
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Solo operator ran his whole business on 14 the AI scheduled tasks for 30 days
A Japanese solo operator's measured 30-day log (Sept 10-Oct 10, 2026): 14 the AI scheduled tasks ran his sales outreach, publishing and bookkeeping: collecting job postings every morning, patrolling for new postings hourly, watching email every 30 minutes, drafting proposals (255 drafted; 3 replies; 2 contracts totaling 8,500 yen; product sales 0 yen), posting nightly note articles and five daily Shorts slots, and restarting stalled tasks. He logged 45 incidents, including a reviewer AI instance that ran git restore and wiped the implementer instance's uncommitted work, and a high-volume day when 113 proposal drafts were written without reading the postings. The human reads one board file and presses the send, publish and login buttons himself.
¥8,500
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI helped design his first two circuit boards ever, and working prototypes arrived
The AI helped design his first 2 PCBs ever, identifying components, reviewing, and writing Python scripts that generate the KiCad files; working prototypes were received.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
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.