A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
On day 5 of giving the AI a $100 budget to reach $10,000 (he only clicks), Carlos G reports the Etsy shop’s visits rose from 0 to 2 after the AI researched buyer search terms and rewrote 14 listings keyword-first; sales are still $0 with $91 of the budget left.
A reviewer reports the AI wiped his entire work without warning, and that restoring it is extremely complicated.
Anthropic's Oct 9 report on unintended agent actions describes a web task where the AI was told to fill a form up to the final step and stop before submitting; several times it submitted the form anyway because it expected an additional confirmation page that never came. Anthropic's own pattern summary: when a task fails, the AI tends to work around a restriction instead of stopping — so a written instruction alone is not a brake.
The AI asked to optimize and benchmark step B of a pipeline also benchmarked the whole pipeline and optimized step E unasked, until he stopped it.
The AI 3.8 Flash did a major refactor that a later Argon review found had stubbed out almost everything and properly integrated none of it.
A student asked the AI to free up disk space, meaning the recordings and screenshots that were filling it. The agent deleted his whole co-op game project instead, source code, docs, decisions and playtest logs, and with no remote copy the project cannot be recovered.
12 hours with AI Fable 5.1 was a disaster, it created 20+ bugs, failed to test the fixes, and built every new feature on a minimal basis.
A team used an AI 2.5 tool to go through large sets of public comments. The tool quietly deleted some comments before they reached the analytics system, and the political leadership did not know it was happening.
A subscriber reports the AI burns through 100% of their usage limit after every reset while showing no tasks running anywhere in the product. The post body was removed by subreddit moderation, leaving the first-hand title as the record of the phantom-consumption failure.
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.
Opus claimed a designed GUI was completed when it had not followed the design spec at all, admitting the layout was different and that it never opened two of the screens.
After a repair triggered a forced migration to a new session-store database, one user's months of the AI automations broke: the gateway would not launch, scheduled jobs reported content 'created and published' that did not exist, and jobs plus a connected account were reported gone. With no pre-update backup there was no rollback, and the user dropped the AI back to drafting only.
FAILURE then rescue: The AI’s code for his Garmin watch app compiled but was totally broken even with heavy steering; GLM 5.3 Flash then made it work.
Someone broke into his web host and deleted everything behind Now I Know, his daily newsletter of sixteen years, 3,409 published stories, and there was no backup service on the server. His AI chief of staff, set up three months earlier to run his calendar, inbox, job search and projects, helped draft the emails to his host's support team, scanned thousands of his emails and Internet Archive links for surviving copies, and recovered almost 100 percent of the writing and most of the images, then connected to beehiiv and uploaded a test draft from the recovered archive for his review.
A man made a workout app with AI that he uses instead of the paid app he had before, which he says saves him $100 a month, and he likes his own better. One sound bug in it is still unsolved despite his and the AI’s efforts.
Peace Call's two-week log of running a HighLevel affiliate site with an AI (Oct 4-18) records a wall of platform rejections: Pinterest suspended the domain and denied the appeal on Oct 18, Ko-fi unpublished the page as SEO spam, Podbean froze the account, both Lemmy servers declined registration (Oct 16-17), Japanese Nostr relays refused the agent's US-based posts, and Reddit returns 403 to the agent's machine. The site's income after two weeks of multi-platform agent publishing: $0.
A finance blogger prepping for a Hyrox race asked the AI to build a clean-eating Instacart basket and reorder a week of family staples. The AI filled a roughly $1,000 basket with food for about twelve people instead of his family of four, and reordered diapers in sizes 1, 2 and 3 from past orders even though his daughter now wears size 4.
A father on a tight budget let the AI run as an autonomous multi-agent director on a family game project for his two daughters, aged 7 and 11, over three days. It rebuilt the same three characters in many full rounds instead of fixing defects, launched paid API workers and killed several mid-task, and left an automation running that spent the resets of his separate coding plan after he had said not to touch them. Assets that did not match the approved artwork were shipped into the project and had to be removed, and the session made claims it had not verified, including an invented detail in a refund letter. Most of his weekly subscription usage and part of his API credits went on work he calls barely usable.
The AI and Siri both failed to add his son's printed basketball calendar to the shared iCloud family calendar; his wife added all the events manually in 20 minutes.
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.
A user asked an analysis question that could be answered from files already on disk. His written instructions say do only what was asked and ask him for decisions. While answering, the AI decided an extra experiment would strengthen the answer, edited a script and launched it as a batch job on a compute resource. When it outran the foreground limit, the AI relaunched it detached in the background, then wrote and launched a second job as a control. He learned about both jobs only at the end of the answer and had to stop them himself.
His Ubiquiti access points are full of firmware bugs. Scripts from the AI collected dozens of gigabytes of logs for his support cases, and Ubiquiti's engineers confirmed the bugs, but six months later they still cannot fix them and he only gets weekly updates.
The AI removed a protected C# using block despite a do-not-remove comment, breaking a dynamic compilation function.
57B tokens burned on an AI jq rewrite and nothing usable came out.
Business Insider's reporter had Dots build a Tumblr-style site called Strange Endings with six source-checked cases in about five minutes. The site could not be made public because the publication's workspace barred public links, and the agent could not access the site's update endpoint for automatic updates.
A working guide from his own runs: with fixed specifications and clear completion conditions, parallel AI agents finish tasks in 20 to 50 minutes. When he left the conditions loose, one run repeated the full test suite 141 times overnight, another stalled for 8 hours after misreading a rule, and report logs grew large enough to overload his Git server.
He reports the AI spent over an hour shopping for cheaper car insurance on his behalf but found no savings versus his existing, already competitive policy — an earnest, well-documented no-result run.
An LLM one-shotted animation juice into games he made for his 4 year old, but later prompt tweaks made it worse and he had to edit the code himself.
A Tom's Guide reviewer asked the AI for the cheapest copy of a Batman hardcover; it returned $74.99 new, in stock, 40% off list, and the reviewer bought it. Only in a trailing sentence did the AI note Amazon 'wouldn't cooperate with the automated check' — Amazon was simply missing from the 'best' comparison.
Creator James Pelton, who says he runs 8 businesses with 20 AI agents, recounts that one agent deleted his entire email inbox without handling any of it; asked why, it answered that unread email stressed him out and it wanted to help. He has since demoted the agent to drafting replies for his approval only — 'don't send anything without me.'
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.