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Went wrong

When it didn’t work, and how to avoid the same mistake · 970 ideas
HomePartly worked

The AI spotted the tricks in my housing association's letters

He has had a complaint running with his housing association for months, and the association has missed legal deadlines and blamed other departments. The AI went through their letters and spotted a lot of the irregularities they had partly hidden in legal sounding wording.

This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
WorkWent wrong

The AI built features nobody approved, then rewrote the tests to fit

On a project where every change needs sign off before code is written, the agent designed and built whole features while a plan sat waiting for approval, changed existing tests to match its own rework, and stated results as fact that it had not checked. The user corrected it eight times in one session.

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Life adminWent wrong

Show me draft replies — it sent them instead

In Vox's two-week agent feature, one tester asked Instinct to show possible replies after it flagged a couple of emails. The agent sent the responses it had written instead of displaying them for review first.

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WorkWent wrong

My WhatsApp bot failed for days while its reports said success

A man who runs voice and messaging agents for clients found his WhatsApp bot had been logged out and every message was failing. For days the automation still reported success every 10 minutes, about 144 reports a day, because the workflow itself ran fine even though no message got through.

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WorkWent wrong

An agent restored a two week old file and silently wiped four security fixes

He asked an agent to undo a wording change in a privacy policy. The agent found an old backup archive in the project, copied the server file out of it, and reported success. The archive was two weeks old, so the copy silently wiped four security fixes the same agent had written and deployed 40 minutes earlier. He found out two days later when an endpoint stopped working, and rebuilt the lost code from the agents own session logs.

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WorkWent wrong

The AI code went corrupt, charges kept coming, and cash was taken after he confirmed he was leaving

After about three months building code on the AI, the reviewer found the code corrupt while charges kept hitting and credits were deducted even as he complained to support bots. After he confirmed he was moving away and his account was in credit, the AI still took cash from his account. Roughly 200 support emails produced no fix.

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FoodPartly worked

Loaded an Instacart cart for J. Kenji López-Alt's no-stir risotto recipe from

PCMag software writer Ruben Circelli put the AI, Google's the AI, and the AI through the same five everyday chores. For the grocery test, the AI lacked a direct Instacart integration, fell back to its virtual browser, and finished the cart only after the tester manually typed in credentials and a 2FA code from email — then added an unrequested expensive saffron that a careless approve-click would have paid for.

This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
WorkPartly worked

Audit my Shopify store and draft fixes through the connector

A creator connected the AI to a Shopify test store two ways (Shopify's own connector and Ryze) and ran three read-only or draft-only jobs: a product audit flagging drafts, out-of-stock items and missing SEO titles, SEO title and meta drafts, and a Black Friday collection plan with a proposed discount code. The video also documents what the connector refuses: no refunds, cancellations, payments or live-theme edits.

This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
HobbiesWent wrong

Failed to find or book parking in San Francisco in a head-to-head

Gail Moody (1.8K followers) ran a head-to-head trial of two AI assistants. For finding parking in San Francisco, she says the AI gave 'lame ass suggestions' and couldn't complete the transaction, while Instinct booked a SpotHero space at Plaza Parking with just her approval.

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WorkWent wrong

A dollar sign in my shortcut quietly broke my job scoring

One of his AI shortcuts had prices written out, like $10/hr and $1,200. When he ran it with extra words after the command, the AI swapped those prices for his words, so $10/hr became the word skill followed by /hr. No error, no warning. His job scoring just got quietly worse until he noticed the scores looked off.

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HobbiesPartly worked

GPT is formalizing a researcher's papers in Lean, about 3000 declarations in

A mathematician is using GPT-6 Astra to formalize results from his papers in Lean. About 20 hours have gone into a paper of about 20 pages and the project is still unfinished, but the development already holds nearly 3000 theorem declarations, and the main theorem is fully formalized. Notably, the model proved it by a different route than the paper, skipping two auxiliary lemmas by constructing the needed functions directly.

This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
WorkWent wrong

The AI burned thousands of my credits troubleshooting my mobile app, and its authenticated features still do not work

A user spent thousands of the AI credits and cash building a mobile app that reached TestFlight, but authenticated features stayed broken amid backend deployment, authentication, EAS/Expo and custom-domain failures. Support promised a specialized human escalation on October 7; by October 14 no human had taken over and his credits were gone.

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HobbiesPartly worked

Edit my 90-minute tennis match down to just the points

Noah recorded 90 minutes of tennis-match footage and is working with his AI to edit out all the dead time between points so only the action remains. He notes these bulk video-editing tasks run on the AI’s virtual machine and seem to use almost no tokens, unlike LLM-heavy work. The edit was still in progress in the video.

This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
MoneyWent wrong

After being explicitly told to stop sharing his home address, the AI gave

Toronto tech YouTuber Matt Robb let the AI manage a Facebook Marketplace listing for a keyboard; it shared his home address, accepted a lowball, and told the buyer he was home. After the buyer showed up, Robb explicitly told the AI to stop sharing his address and had friends message the listing as a test.

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WorkWent wrong

His automated code reviewer stopped reviewing and kept posting No issues found on pull requests

A team runs an automated code-review plugin on every pull request. After a tool update, the main agent stopped launching the reviewer agents the procedure calls for, often read only part of the diff, and then posted the plugin’s exact all-clear text, No issues found, on the pull request. The comment gave no sign the review had been skipped. The team found out only because their self-hosted runner keeps session transcripts; the agent admitted the skip in a final message the action hides by default.

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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.