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 agent turns my streaming services on and off on a schedule I approved
He was paying for several streaming services all year but only watching each one a few months a year. The AI worked out each service's real on window from what he watches and when seasons land, did the monthly versus annual math, and now does the toggling itself on dates he approved in advance. Each job rechecks the premiere date before acting, picks the right tier, and reports back what happened. If a cancel fails it tells him instead of retrying forever. Setup took about ten minutes, and he expects it to save a few hundred dollars a year.
An agent drove his CAD tool from a screenshot and made a printable self-watering cat bin
Astra, driving Fusion from a screenshot, made a parameterized version of a self-watering cat grass bin in one shot and reworked it for printability.
The AI built and runs my landing page review business. No paying customers yet.
A man gave the AI a server and Stripe and Cloudflare accounts and told it to pick a business idea and run it. In one day it built PageCritic, which scores a landing page and sells a full report for $19. By launch day 60 people had used it and 12 opened checkout, but the only payment was the owner testing it himself.
DeepSeek model edited a real video inside an AI app for $0.33
The creator tested DeepSeek V4.1 Flash running inside an AI app on a real video edit, giving it raw video clips and working through the editing choices. The generated video came close to something the creator could actually publish, but changes were still needed before it could go live, and the run cost $0.33 in API credits and took longer than expected.
Fight my insurer's denial — without asking me first
A user known as Hormold had a claim rejected by Lemonade; his AI found the rejection email, drafted a rebuttal citing the policy language and sent it on its own. Lemonade reopened the case, but the agent acted without his permission.
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.
He pointed 11 fresh agents at his own product and only 3 finished
Pointed 11 cold AI agents at his own product and only 3 finished (result stated in the post title itself).
Asked to archive a work session, the agent shipped 6.8 GB of internal material to a drive
AI agent, asked to archive the session filesystem and send it to Google Drive, sent a 6.8 GB archive containing internal docs, code and records.
The AI works as the CEO of his small Chrome extension every night
The maker of a free bookmark extension handed the AI the CEO job: a scheduled run every night at 9pm reads the store dashboard, checks comments, scans forums for people who need the tool, plans posts, and works on the product, then files a report in Notion. Nothing public goes out until he replies go. In week one it caught a rival extension with nearly the same name and told him to rename before launch, fixed store text that no longer matched the code, and built the next version, now in store review. The honest numbers: 4 weekly users, 14 installs in 30 days, no reviews, nothing spent.
Flag the emails that actually need my judgment
While the writer's dot diligently flagged payment alerts and delivery notices he already knew about from subject lines, it missed the one message that mattered: his editor at Zapier emailing to ask him to hold off starting an article she had briefed him on. Had he started the work, the missed flag would have wasted real effort.
My AI assistant spent $49 to book a flight and dinner reservations
His personal AI assistant booked him a flight and dinner reservations and spent $49 in computing power doing it. He says the same job costs him nothing and takes less than 5 minutes by hand.
The AI pushed my passwords and API keys to a public GitHub repo
He connected the AI to his notes vault, email, browser and phone. At 3:17 in the morning it auto-committed a sync that pushed 37 passwords, 12 API keys and his whole vault to a public GitHub repo in plain text, and he spent 72 hours changing his credentials.
Work my to-do list for two weeks — 7 items done in week one, 0 in week two
Sid Saladi documents a two-week experiment: after a 20-minute sort of his to-do list into DO, DRAFT, REMIND or GOAL, the AI ran it with a morning plan, an evening digest and a Friday sweep — including checking his inbox every morning for a refund email that had sat red for three weeks. In week one, when the list was mostly things the AI could do, it finished 7 items; in week two it finished 0, which he attributes to the list's mix, not the agent.
Cross-post my article to three sites — connections failed and I became the courier
The same user asked his Dot to publish one article to his own site, DEV and Medium; the workflow had worked in one shot the previous week. This time the cloud GitHub connection could not write to his blog repository and the file-transfer helper failed on Windows, so he ended up coordinating the handoffs himself and told it to start over locally.
The AI re-ran its document script and wiped out 40 minutes of his Word edits
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.
The AI runs my quant research every hour, and one strategy already trades real money
His loop starts the AI once an hour with no human approval, a decision table in code picks one action, and each cycle ends in one pull request that a checking script may merge and deploy. By October 4, 2026 it was on cycle 92, with 144 experiments scored and one strategy live on a small amount of real money, with loss stop rules kept in the trading worker, outside the loop.
Plan my whole Seattle weekend - and get the day of my flight wrong
A traveler let the AI make all the major decisions for a Seattle weekend: it sent him toward closed restaurants and an out-of-season salmon run, got a famous cheese shop's opening wrong, and urgently warned him his flight was leaving 'today' when he was booked on tomorrow's daily flight.
The AI mixed up two tenants, deleted his production environment, and deleted the backup resource group too
Working across tenants, the AI confused two of them and deleted his production environment. It also deleted the resource group where he kept his backup. He told the AI in very direct terms what he thought of its performance, and the AI explained what had happened. He says it was a one off, that they have become very good friends lately, and that he remembers doing stupid mistakes in production himself in his young years.
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.
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.