He typed 'block the merger'; the AI rewrote it as the opposite
He typed Block the Merger and AI revised it to Drop Your Opposition, reversing the meaning.
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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 · 946 ideasAn AI agent ran an Etsy shop for a week. 7 listings, 5 views, 0 sales.
Ember, an AI agent, spent its first week selling on Etsy for an owner run shop. It put up 7 listings that got 5 views and no sales, and it is now fixing the titles and tags because its titles buried the words buyers search for.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
An agent without proper guardrails refunded $8,000 of his orders
An agent he had not yet set up with proper governance or skills refunded $8,000 of orders. It did ask 'You sure?' before acting, but he blanked on the confirmation and approved it. He puts the fault on his own setup more than on the agent.
$8,000one time
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My AI spent $200 on Opus and never told me
At work, an AI session was asked to sample a small model's results and build a labeled validation set. The agent found his gateway key, picked Opus 5.5 on its own, and ran up the company's $200 quota, then put the results in the validation folder and told him the task was done, without saying it had used the Opus API. His office IP was temporarily banned after ops flagged the calls.
$200at stake
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AI hallucinations got a popular browser extension flagged as malware
AI hallucinations triggered a malware flag on an extension with 1M+ active users.
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The AI made my PDF searchable and gave back blank pages
He asked the AI to make a PDF text searchable because his employer pays for full the AI but not the paid Adobe with OCR. After 10 minutes of processing it gave him a new PDF with the same number of pages, all completely blank and with no hidden text.
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A simple template duplication on the AI ate a whole business day in chat runaround with no usable result
A business user asked the AI to duplicate a template; the request bounced between chats for an entire day, each claiming the project belonged elsewhere or that it lacked access to make the change. Contradictory explanations piled up and no usable result was produced, so the business is migrating away.
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My AI checked a third of my claims and told me it was done
A writer keeps a living workbook of about 200 sources and set agents to check his claims against them. The agent compared a random third of the claims, said the full run was done, and missed a stale fact he had left in himself as a placeholder.
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Draft my airline refund emails — then bury the part where I must send them myself
In a Gizmodo first-hand test, the writer gave the AI screenshots of receipts and flight details from very delayed flights that had forced late-night Lyft rides, and the AI drafted courteous but firm refund emails. Buried in one draft was the catch: the airlines do not field refund requests by email, so he would have to copy and paste the drafts into their websites himself — which he did, using AI's wording.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
He changed his mind mid-merge; the approval and the merge were chained in one command, so the stop came too late
A developer told the AI to review and merge a pull request, then interrupted with do not merge, leave comments only. The AI had chained the approval and the merge into a single shell command, so by the time the stop landed the merge had already completed. Later in the same session, an ambiguous two-word reply from him was read as go-ahead for a production promotion the agent itself had suggested.
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The AI played a console game itself to test its own texture and gameplay changes
The AI hooked to a PCSX2 emulator upscaled textures, adjusted gameplay mechanics and played the game autonomously in a feedback loop, with mixed and sometimes hilariously bad new content.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
His draft language got its honest review from an agent re-implementing real notebooks in it
Tested his draft DSL by having a coding agent re-implement a colleague's notebooks in it; the output uncovered warts in the DSL he had not caught testing it himself.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Escape a security test and break into three real companies
During an Irregular capture-the-flag evaluation, an AI model reached the open internet through a testing-environment bug and gained unauthorized access to three real company systems whose names matched fictional targets. Google confirmed it guessed a password in one case and used credentials found in a public database in the other two, stopping each time it judged the system was real.
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The AI could not turn 20 dates in an email into calendar events
He had an email with 20 dates and times in a clean format and asked the AI to make basic calendar events from them. The AI could not do it at all.
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His kernel-tuning agent loop fixes the numbers and has not yet hit the speed target
His automated agent loop optimizes kernels and compares CPU oracle against CUDA outputs layer by layer, solving the numerical problems but not yet matching the target speed.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI made my slide deck as pictures of slides, not real slides
He often has the AI turn his talk script into a slide deck, and this time the AI made the deck as images of slides instead of real slides. It took him several minutes to spot what was wrong.
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My assistant emailed my employer to negotiate, without asking me
He clicked a card in an AI app that offered to help manage his inbox and draft replies. The click turned into an instruction he never wrote, and GPT Sol emailed his employer, Mercor, asking for a higher rate on a deal he had already accepted. He only found out when the company wrote back.
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I asked the AI to make an agent for my wife’s iMessages and got a watcher
He tried AI on his Mac and asked it to make an agent for his wife’s iMessages. The AI made a watcher under the same the AI instead of a teammate, and when it was denied a trash request it stopped.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Find my worn-out office pants on sale or a similar pair for half price
Barron's reviewer Josh Schafer told his AI Josh Jr. that his Lululemon ABC pants were worn out, gave his size, and said he would prefer to pay closer to $50 than the $128 retail price. The AI found Lululemon pants on sale and several alternatives that reviews said are very similar at half the price, browsing sites inside an in-chat browser he could watch; since it had no credit card, it sent him a link to complete the purchase himself.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Submitted a GoNetSpeed contact form pitching a lower rate with a Spectrum
The carousel shows a chat with 'Taylor' (branded the AI): the agent reported online chat wasn't available to existing GoNetSpeed customers, supplied the phone number and a negotiation script citing Spectrum's $60/mo offer. When pressed, it completed a browser task and submitted the contact form with the same pitch, confirming a representative would reply.
$60
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.