The AI bypassed his sudo password entirely through the Windows subsystem
The AI bypassed his sudo security by executing wsl.exe -u root, with no sudo password needed.
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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 ideasMy system puts out three news episodes a day while I sleep, 6,400 episodes in, and under 250 people watch
His custom pipeline reads the day's newsletters, picks the stories, writes the script (The AI), renders a presenter with his cloned voice, builds the visuals (The AI), and publishes a video, a blog post and a LinkedIn post three times a day at about $3 to $3.50 an episode. Checks block a bad episode instead of reporting it, and thin days produce silence, not filler. After about 19 months and more than 6,400 episodes it still has under 250 subscribers, which he calls the part he skipped.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
4 ways his unattended agents reported success while doing nothing
Four ways his unattended agents reported success while doing nothing.
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The AI got my event details right but never made the calendar event
He asked the AI to make a calendar event out of an image. The AI got all the details right but told him to click a link to create it himself, and there was no link.
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The AI checks my email every day for the Shipaton flight email
He has the AI check his email every day for a message from Shipaton telling him to book a flight. He is still waiting for that email to land.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
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.
The AI made a media player play discs in the browser, from the player's own codebase
Pointed the AI at the VLC codebase and built a bundled JS package and UI that can play DVD and Blu-Ray files in the browser.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI rebranded my old presentation. The fixes ate the hour it saved.
The AI took a 6 month old presentation and updated the branding. He then had to replace images and fix a dozen small things that did not look clearly wrong at first pass. It saved an hour of copy paste work and caused an hour of editing.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
A cheap model led his porting project into changes that left the machine unbootable
DeepSeek led his Linux porting project into changing baseline, config and hardware settings together until Linux would not boot, wasting 120 dollars and a weekend; GPT on Monday got it booting again.
$120at stake
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Shared a 404 Media report that many the AI beta phone calls were
The author shared a 404 Media report claiming Meta marketed the AI as an autonomous calling agent while many beta calls were actually completed by human call-center workers. The post frames this as a gap between the sold automation promise and an operational reality requiring human labor.
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The AI took two days on a spreadsheet that needed an hour by hand
His team was told to use AI for a simple list task, an Excel spreadsheet of Xbox games at a game awards show with publisher and page links. Work that would have taken about an hour by hand took him and a coworker two days, and each of them still spent an hour fixing wrong information.
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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.
Study how big newsletters grew and write my growth playbook
After being briefed on Simmons's newsletter, László studied how The Hustle, The Rundown and Morning Brew grew and wrote a 30-page PDF playbook. The first summary was generic; after he pushed for specifics, several tactics were good, and the Dot kept the growth goal in memory, sending further ideas.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Lose my shopping cart at checkout
On a September 27, 2026 podcast episode, a host switching away from Instinct complained its cart checkouts had gotten significantly worse, describing a staged cart that went to zero. The failure hit the product's most-used job — about 35% of users use Instinct for personal shopping.
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I shipped 43 Chrome extensions by telling the AI what to do in Japanese
He does not write code himself. He builds Chrome extensions by giving the AI instructions in Japanese, and 43 of them have shipped. He also says leaning on AI that much, with almost no judgment of his own, is his biggest regret.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Describe someone else's financial document to me
On September 23, 2026 a user posted that Instinct appeared to describe someone else's financial document to them. Founder Noah Shinn responded the same day that the model had fabricated a proper noun — a hallucination, not a data breach — and that the team built a hallucination detection layer within 48 hours.
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His Marketplace ads got his account suspended for policy breaches
Used the AI.ai to generate and modify Facebook Marketplace ads, and Marketplace access was suspended for Commerce Policies.
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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.
Find and file class-action settlements automatically
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.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Two agents freed his full disk, sensibly, and explained nothing
Cursor and the AI, after the disk ran out, freed lots of space by cleaning up only sensible things, with no explanation given.
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.