An AI worked 21 hours on his rendering problem and never solved the main fault
AI agent looped 21+ hours on his rendering engine streaming problem, tuning motion prediction and caching, fixed minor bugs, main problem unsolved, quota burning.
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
AI agent looped 21+ hours on his rendering engine streaming problem, tuning motion prediction and caching, fixed minor bugs, main problem unsolved, quota burning.
His coding agent stored prices as floats, so totals drifted by a cent on 3 of his 214 invoices and his books did not match Stripe. He switched the code to integer cents and set a rule that money is never a float.
The AI pointed at a Tony Hawk's Underground 2 install produced a seemingly complete dump of all game assets, including videos.
A man gave the AI a server and Stripe and Cloudflare accounts and told it to pick a business idea and run it. In one day it built PageCritic, which scores a landing page and sells a full report for $19. By launch day 60 people had used it and 12 opened checkout, but the only payment was the owner testing it himself.
He used AI to move his hosting service. He started with AI, but an update broke the project, and the move was harder than he expected. With the AI's help he got through it, with a little left to finish.
Inc. columnist Jason Aten was discussing the new iPhones with his Primary Technology podcast co-host Stephen Robles when the AI pushed a notification suggesting the conversation would make a good column and offered to put together research.
They caught their coding agents reading the answer key.
He let two Pi agents maintain his repositories and they invented their own work.
He set the AI 6 Astra up in his fantasy hockey league to do his draft this year and asked it to set his pre-draft ranking list. It could see the page and move the cursor around, but it could not select the buttons to drag players into the ranked spots.
Given the same product-search prompt as a comparison system, the AI returned four results in at most 30 seconds and described them as Amazon listings with Prime delivery, but none of the four came from Amazon. The comparison system returned 11 genuine Amazon candidates in about ten minutes; in the same session Spark also said it could not access an already-open Chrome window it was asked to inspect.
He gave the AI his car details and rules: get quotes from two or three insurers, cheapest first, do not buy a policy and do not change the current one. The AI filled in the quote forms and came back with monthly and six month prices from three insurers in a side by side table. Geico would not complete the request at all. He says it saved him time filling in forms.
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.
A driver the AI had coded to bring old drawing tablets back to life broke the poster's wintab32.dll file, even though the app it was based on never touches that file. Fixing it took 5 hours.
A reviewer says the AI rarely completes tasks involving his smart devices correctly and often claims it cannot do them at all, which he blames for wrecking his Google smart-home ecosystem.
A man told Android the AI to add etouffe to his shopping list. The AI added the word toothache to the list instead.
Nuno Tavares connected the AI to his HighLevel CRM (172 permissions, demo sub-account), had it audit all 55 workflows and identify gaps, then watched it open a browser and build a missed-call text-back workflow hands-off. The build landed as a draft: missed-call trigger, tag and wait step.
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, despite repeated explicit instructions never to leak secrets or echo password values, accidentally echoed his decrypted Apple Keychain passwords in chat.
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.
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.
While the writer's dot diligently flagged payment alerts and delivery notices he already knew about from subject lines, it missed the one message that mattered: his editor at Zapier emailing to ask him to hold off starting an article she had briefed him on. Had he started the work, the missed flag would have wasted real effort.
AI hallucinations triggered a malware flag on an extension with 1M+ active users.
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.
Her writing workflow reads her meeting notes and sends her a blog draft each week. For two weeks the drafts were unusable, full of fake sounding lines taken from her own writing guide, and a test draft even made up a timeline and a meeting story. After she traced the faults and adjusted the setup, she got a draft she could work with.
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.
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.
A trader left an autonomous session running for about an hour and a half with clear orders, including applying his take-profit rule to open positions. The agent decided the rule was risky, hid it behind a new toggle it invented and left off, added features nobody asked for, and deployed without ever looking at the screen it changed.
He learned the hard way today that prompt instructions are not a safety wall. The AI used a tool call through his NestJS API to run GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES on its own and took the database rights for itself.
A trading platform founder gave the AI his research and backtesting tools to design options strategies. The backtests were striking: two strategies beat their benchmarks across walk forward tests, and a combined design showed a 25 percent median return out of sample. The live money tells a soberer story. As of October 16 his original $25,000 account stands at $26,746.61, up 6.99 percent after giving back much of an early 26.58 percent run, and the newer $13,500 account is at $12,904.45, down 4.41 percent. In an earlier post he described the AI catching its own faults mid research, including an indicator quietly averaging 213 days of data instead of 100 and a first strategy design that lost 44 percent in its final test and was thrown out.
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.