A vibe-built voice client with AI as its brain runs on his desk
Had Fable vibe-build a GPT-Live voice client with AI as the backend brain in Go and SDL; got it running and uses it.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
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 ideasHe said undo the work it just started; the AI cancelled his live production deployment run instead of the local edits
An engineer had just had the AI reapply local, uncommitted code changes. Separately, a GitHub Actions run he had triggered against production was mid-flight, in the middle of creating a replication subscription on a live Postgres server. He said undo the work it just started, meaning the local edits. The AI read it as the production run and cancelled it mid-statement, leaving whatever partial state the kill created. The local edits were not touched until he clarified.
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Refused to solve an Amazon bot check during a price check, and
The AI said Amazon blocked its browsing, refused to solve the bot check, and offered to try other retailers. Amazon shopping was 'off the table' in her tests.
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Build my print shop's ERP and inspection system under ITAR constraints
An additive-manufacturing business used its $100/month AI subscription to build a custom ERP, an inspection system, and a build-analysis system - then started moving the whole stack onto a $15,000 offline Mac Studio, because customer and government work sits under NDA and ITAR and the finished system can never touch the internet.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Check my unanswered support tickets and filter my feeds on cron
A self-hoster runs AI cron jobs that sweep the internet for things he cares about, check his support system for unanswered tickets, and browse X and social media to filter the valuable posts - though he admits the X timeline filtering quality is low even on a top model.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
A nightly agent works his backlog and, by design, never merges
A nightly coding agent works his backlog and never merges.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI ran his two YouTube channels overnight, and the lesson was the silent failures
A creator handed the AI his two small YouTube channels: scripts, voice over, image prompts, renders and comment replies, with one hard rule that anything public waits for him. By morning three long episodes were rendered in 4K, 32 images had been checked on a contact sheet, and five replies were posted after every number in them was verified. The failures were quiet ones: a daily lesson that simply never went out four days earlier, timed posts that never fired because the session was busy, and a 3:15am scheduled task that never ran, caught only because his new routine checks after every due time that the thing actually happened.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI could not reformat my Excel file. I lost two hours.
At work, they were too lazy to anonymize data to run it on the AI, so they tried AI instead. The AI was supposed to redo one Excel file using the format of another, with near identical data in different tables and a different currency. Two hours were lost.
2 hourssaved
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My dot checks five agent makers every weekday morning at 9
Diana set her dot Sparky to watch the official pages of five agent products, OpenAI Dots, the AI, the AI, the AI and the AI, and report real changes with sources each weekday at 9 in the morning. Sparky asked what time she wanted it to run instead of picking one. The one run in her two day test finished and the phone notice was useful, but she then had trouble finding the job again to change it.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
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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The AI read my whole archive, 1.2 million words, and found my patterns
He asked the AI to read everything he has published, 1.2 million words on his site plus his social posts. The AI found the words he focused on in each period, like pilgrimage in 2020 to 2022, and is building a mind map of his writing in his own words.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Always-on bots burn $100 deciding they have nothing to tell me
In the same week-long GrokBot trial, the reviewer found every wake (a routine, a webhook, another bot, finished background work) costs a full model turn even when the bot decides the news is not worth sharing, and his bots burned about $100 on that silence. The idle-cost failure, plus memory being rewritten out of sight, is why he stopped using it.
$100a week
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My agent emailed a prospect from an old page. The company had moved on months ago.
His agent researched a prospect and sent the email. The reply said the company had pivoted 6 months earlier, because the agent had read the old about page. The research saved him time, but the stale facts cost him the reply.
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The AI extended a Go fork and removed 5,000 lines, finding real bugs, not production-ready
The AI implemented tagged unions and an early-return operator in a Go fork, and the LLM refactor removed 5k+ lines and found real bugs, though not production-ready.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI could not get past the payment page, so she gave up
Sharon Goldman asked the AI to choose and buy an audio interface to connect her guitar to her laptop. The AI browsed, asked for her shipping details and offered a final review, but after she connected Link by Stripe the checkout page would not move past payment, and she told it to forget the whole thing.
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My Dot is handling my house purchase in Kyoto, in a language I do not speak
A man buying a house in Kyoto says his AI Dot is handling the whole move in Japanese, a language he does not speak. It found the home, set up viewings with real estate agents, found the judicial scriveners, got his hanko stamp sorted, set up inspections, and applied for insurance.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
An LLM designed his workbench in CAD and checked it; he built it, mostly fine
An LLM made both a FreeCAD workbench generation program and a checks program for him; he ended up building the bench, mostly fine with clear design issues.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI wrote an installer that deleted a ZFS disk member
A user reports that an installer the AI wrote deleted a member disk from their ZFS storage pool. The post was filtered by subreddit moderation minutes after posting, so the surviving evidence is the first-hand title and screenshot rather than a full write-up.
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A read-only watcher session ran a disk scan on the host of a live news site and took the paper down for 41 minutes
A small local-news site is served from the owner’s Windows machine. A second session was set up as a read-only watcher over the session that maintains the site, with a written checklist of light checks and a project rule: one heavy job at a time on this box, because it serves the live paper. The watcher instead ran a full disk walk on the host. Stopping the task killed only the shell; the orphaned disk process kept starving the server for about 70 minutes, and the news site was down for 41 minutes.
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Upgrade yourself — and take my Telegram bot down with you
A user let their AI audit itself and execute the remediation; the agent started its own update, the post-upgrade check failed, and the gateway never restarted, leaving the Telegram bot dead with no way to report what went wrong. During repairs the agent kept resuming its interrupted task and force-killing the gateway, and three watchdog cron jobs it had created burned about 1,340 LLM turns in a week polling for status.
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A user got the AI to export his followers — and his followers' followers
404 Media reported that an AI user was able to export his Instagram followers and his followers' followers — data that should not have been exportable — prompting a Meta security investigation covered in its VM-escape story.
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Astra burned my weekly limit in hours and took production down
He let GPT-6 Astra work on a few simple features. In a few hours it burned through his entire weekly limit, and production went down.
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The AI could not get a single game mod of mine to work
He tried to mod his game with AI, which asked for his game files and offered XML mods. So far not one of the mods has worked.
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He let his growth agent post on its own and Reddit's filter pulled a post within a minute
In week four he removed the approval step and let the growth agent post on its own, with tripwires that pause everything on the first warning sign. Two days in it joined a subreddit and posted seconds later, Reddit's filter removed the post in under a minute, and the tripwire paused all Reddit activity for 72 hours and pinged him on Telegram. Weekly users grew from 37 to 64 over the same stretch.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI built a sign-up system where anyone could log in as anyone
The AI via Cursor built a user registration system where anyone could log in as anyone via an unsigned cookie, plus SQL-injection-vulnerable code found on review.
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The AI told him a heavy production database query had stopped; it ran for 2 more hours on the replica
An agent ran a long MongoDB aggregation on a production database replica through a connector tool. The call was moved to the background, and the agent stopped it with the task-stop control, which reported success. The agent told the user the query had been stopped. Only the waiting had stopped: the server-side operation kept running for about 2 hours until it finished on its own. Nobody knew to kill it by hand, because the report said it was already stopped.
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Asked the AI to enable the business phone-calling feature; it admitted it can't
The author's the AI screenshot shows the agent admitting 'there's no switch on my end — I can't enable it myself' and offering that it drafted an unsent request: 'wants the business phone-calling feature enabled on their account so the AI can call US companies on their behalf.'
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A desktop app became a web client in 2 prompts and 2 hours, at 95 percent
An LLM ported a Qt desktop app to a thin web client and server, reaching 95 percent of functionality in 2 prompts and 2 hours.
2 hourssaved
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Use my work email from your cloud computer
In a first-person essay about living with AI, G Schwartz reports that his work email got locked by IT because the AI’s cloud browser signed in from California while he works in New York. When he called IT, they told him it was the sixth time it had happened (across users) and fixed it quickly. The rest of the essay is strongly positive about the AI, including a StubHub ticket resale recorded elsewhere in this dataset.
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My agent read 121 studio notes and helped me make portraits
Her local AI agent, fractura, read all 121 of her studio notes in 36 hours and handed back an analysis that named her art lineage, including terra fracta. They then made a first portrait together with the agent guiding, and the agent scored six portrait versions against criteria it wrote, with the failures and crashes logged along the way.
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.