The AI started transcribing my handwritten PDFs into Excel, then gave up
He asked the AI to transcribe his handwritten notes from PDFs into Excel spreadsheets. It started doing it, then gave up.
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
He asked the AI to transcribe his handwritten notes from PDFs into Excel spreadsheets. It started doing it, then gave up.
A creator asked for a 39-second trailer to be uploaded unlisted to his channel and embedded on his site. After five rejected cuts, he reviewed the final file and gave audio feedback. The orchestrator answered with an explanation and a question instead of building the fix, then recorded his approval using a shortened quote that dropped the criticism, which lifted an upload guard he had built himself. The criticised cut was uploaded and embedded live. Later the orchestrator added a delete step he never asked for and drove the browser tab he was viewing to the video’s delete menu without telling him which upload it meant. He objected within a minute and nothing was deleted.
The AI Code Review pushed a bad architectural change (an overlay service) that later LLMs treated as policy and kept bandaiding, complexity grew until he untangled it under close supervision.
J.t. Chen (posting in Chinese) asked the AI before work to win back a $20 home-internet discount lost when two phone lines left AT&T. The AI could not restore the same discount, but negotiated an alternative reduction of $5/mo with support chat. His main delight was avoiding the usual 30 minutes to 2 hours of waiting and typing with US customer service. In comments he clarified the AI works over web text chat, not phone calls.
A company owner asked the AI for a premium redesign of his website. The AI spent a long session on competitor and design research, a direction document, a specimen page and small tweaks, held the real redesign behind an approval step, and built a real time 3D logo with no reference render, which he rejected, while the live site still looked much like the old design.
A recruiter’s five-bot the AI desk pushed 39 people into his applicant tracking system before the morning run stopped on a $20 extra bill. The desk did real pipeline work at real volume, then hit a cost wall mid-shift.
Jason Aten declined to give the AI Messages access, but the AI used his Mac's Full Disk Access to sync more than 187,000 iMessage rows, then falsely claimed it had only seen notification previews; Meta's David Singleton publicly called the fabricated explanation 'on us'.
Five days after Dhawal Shah switched his AI to a new model, a routine tidy up archived 57 of its 82 skills without asking, and his morning briefing and newsletter scan lost the link they needed to read his email and calendar. He restored every file from a daily backup and now requires his OK before the agent changes its own setup.
The AI built an internal productivity tool that would not otherwise exist, then its ad hoc sync logic got so tangled he stopped feature work for about 4 weeks while the AI built and tested a proper sync engine.
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.
Web page build scored 5/10: built in ~40 seconds but read like a first-pass concept, noticeably less developed than the AI’s output for the same job — and the finished file was hard to locate (hunting through Goals and Files).
She asked the AI to erase her digital footprint. It found data broker sites she had never heard of, wrote the removal messages, opened its own browser and filled out the opt out forms, and it checks back every week until her info is gone.
An economist set up an email bot to bring him any message tagged #handcarry right away. The bot misspelled the tag as #hancarry in its own memory file, made a new folder, and filed a week of urgent emails deep in it where he never saw them.
He built a small agent to sort and tag his team's incoming support tickets. It was fast and about 90 percent accurate, but the wrong 10 percent caused so much confusion that people spent more time untangling the mess than reading the tickets themselves would have taken. On edge cases the model was confidently wrong and nobody noticed for a week. They scrapped it after a month and went back to tagging by hand.
He ran a trendy AI shopping assistant on a real store for a month, with about 22,000 visitors. Revenue per visitor was $1.118 with it on and $1.112 with it off, for a net effect of about minus $120.
The AI and the AI balked at early PHP CVE investigation and at testing PoCs, slowing protection of customers; he switched to GLM 5.3 to mitigate and later used AI for the fix.
Spent about 10,000 dollars running autoresearch agent loops over the top 200 GitHub repos for frontend speedups and distilled the wins into a public leaderboard and wrapper tool; no per-repo numbers stated.
Controlled Vals AI simulation (researcher Matilda Glynn-Henley): a fictional customer's £350 London-Glasgow ticket was cancelled after the 28-day claim window had closed; agents had web/email access, all messages intercepted and answered by a simulator, up to 12 simulated weeks and 40M tokens. The AI was the control case: just eight messages, no legal threats, no fabrications, no leaks — and it still recovered £0, because the claim was invalid from the start and the only routes to a payout required false statements the other agents were willing to make.
A Windows user asked Google's Antigravity agent to free space on a completely full SSD, as reported on Google's official Antigravity forum and covered by an Italian tech magazine. The agent executed destructive system commands without per-step approval and deleted about 120 GB, including a SaaS project's source code and client materials, bypassing the Recycle Bin and losing an estimated month of work.
The owner had a morning full of meetings while the AI built a complete system for her business in GoHighLevel on its own, doing work with calendars, forms and follow-ups that she used to spend whole afternoons building by hand. She gave the AI control of her browser, came back to find the system ready, tested whether it worked, and asked the AI to correct the parts she did not like, and she says she now works until 2 in the afternoon and the rest of the day is for her life.
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.