A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
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.
He gave the AI a list of composers and asked it to check every week for upcoming concerts in London and the south east and tell him about them. It showed him something else instead.
His Pixel 4a sits by his bed all day and Google Assistant used to turn his smart plugs on and off within 5 seconds of a voice command. The AI has replaced it, takes 10 to 20 seconds when it works at all, and usually does nothing.
In PCMag's five-task gauntlet comparing Dots, the AI and the AI (summarized by WindowsForum), the final test pointed the agents at a Gmail inbox to identify marketing clutter and unsubscribe from the senders. The AI identified the emails but failed to launch its browser to actually follow through on external unsubscribe links when required, leaving the execution undone; Dots, by contrast, catalogued 700+ senders and clicked through unsubscribe pages.
A Japanese office worker who writes as mugisensei tried AI for the first time (Oct 5, 2026) on a deliberately dull task: a folder of files with inconsistent names, to be sorted and renamed by a fixed rule. Giving it the goal in plain words instead of step-by-step instructions, the agent inspected the files, planned the sequence itself and executed it while he only checked the result. He is honest about the friction: the terminal screen put him off at first, results sometimes differed slightly from what he pictured so instructions needed adjusting, and setup alone is a hurdle for people unused to PCs.
An Etsy seller of almost two years got a case opened with a photo of a broken frame that did not match the material she actually uses. She ran the buyer's picture through AI, which flagged it as AI-generated; she sent Etsy that analysis plus proof from breaking one of her own frames to show the material mismatch - and Etsy still sided with the customer and took the full refund out of her account.
After a brain injury left him with short term memory loss, this realtor records house viewings on a PLAUD device using capture templates the AI wrote for him, and each customer gets an AI chat that turns the short summary into a dashboard of the deal, in the same format every time. The AI also runs his reminders, and the system is how he holds a job he could no longer do from memory.
His self hosted Bluesky PDS broke after bsky.app added a new CORS header. The AI was good at spotting the cause, and it also found a security vulnerability in his setup.
He has the AI dedupe and reorganize his NAS. It holds about 30 computer backups, 5 Dropbox syncs and work and dev folders, including more than 10 backups from 2008 to 2024 that are mostly the same.
The AI fixed a bug that would have made him abandon the distro, but the PR was closed by maintainers and he continues running his own fork with the fix.
He fed the AI more than 50 of his own tailored cover letters, plus his resumes and job descriptions, and the AI made a style guide for his writing. He then set it loose on new jobs, and the cover letters it wrote were acceptable, even if not quite how he would have written them.
A session generated a Word document with a script. The user then edited the document in Word for about 40 minutes and saved. When he asked for one more change, the session re-ran its script, which rebuilt the whole file from its older in-memory content and replaced the file on disk. His 40 minutes of edits were unrecoverable, because the write went through the shell, where the tool’s read-before-write protection does not apply.
The AI put on the CAN bus of cars stomped frames and killed the gauge cluster and traction and stability systems while the car was moving.
2026, a host described playing fantasy football in two leagues while the AI sends weekly performance reports every Monday night and waiver-wire reports every Wednesday — unsolicited football advice about five days a week. Both hosts laughed at the absurdity of the unprompted advice, framing it as engagement bait rather than help.
Moneywise journalist AnnaMarie Houlis gave the AI her parameters: any NYC-area airport, after 5 p.m. on Oct. 26, carry-on only. The AI returned a reasoned lineup: its pick, a $595 Turkish Airlines flight from JFK (8:40 p.m., 14h45m); the cheapest, a $462 Royal Air Maroc with a 33-hour Casablanca layover; and the fastest, a $725 Air France from Newark (10h45m). She kept the research but booked herself, unwilling to share card details after reported the AI security vulnerabilities.
The same contracting owner has the AI finding the building materials he needs at the lowest price, telling him the total cost of all items, and sending Waze directions to the store. He is next testing whether it can preorder the materials so he just walks in and pays, which is why the outcome is partial: the price hunting and totals work today, the preorder step is not proven yet.
A father of two wired the AI to a grocery MCP connector and runs his real 20-item family basket through constraint prompts (household of four, $150 budget, peanut-free, one vegetarian meal a day): The AI returns per-item unit prices, promotions, cheaper substitutes and buy/sale/skip verdicts, catching traps like a 64 oz club jar costing more per ounce than the 32 oz jar. Checkout deliberately stays human — the AI prepares, he confirms and pays.
Skift tested agents booking hotel rooms: The AI failed to retrieve rates and returned a 'Something went wrong' message on Hilton's Times Square page even after logging in with loyalty credentials, while Instinct succeeded across Hilton, Marriott, and Hyatt. Hilton says it isn't blocking agents — the failures read as technical.
He used the AI for two weeks of daily Excel updates. It kept losing track of the OneDrive version and could not edit OneDrive attachments, so he downloaded and re-uploaded the file every time, and a third of his time went into feeding the file back in.
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.
Handed code, data and a writeup to Astra and Opus 5.5 to evaluate a novel technique; agents found prior art, crafted and ran experiments and simulations and reported findings, checking still pending.
Ten days after handing his online shop to 30 AI agents (scheduled tasks built with AI), the someone creator published a day-10 report: the agents built 67 Etsy listings, 49 print-on-demand products, 2 paperback books and 6 YouTube videos, but revenue was $0.00 on 165 views, 0 favorites and 0 sales, with $42.60 spent. His lesson: "Building is cheap now. Getting seen is the hard part."
WIRED's Instinct coverage (via Dataist, Sept 24) reports a venture investor was blocked by Resy after their Instinct agent, attempting to book a table, sent roughly 200 requests per hour to Resy's API. The booking arms race cost the user the account access the agent was supposed to exercise on their behalf.
Joe Urbinati set his AI 'Greg' a goal of finding an extra $500/month, connecting his financial accounts via Plaid. Greg identified unused subscriptions and two cloud storage plans, which he cancelled; the largest item was idle cash that could earn about $300/month more in a higher-interest account, for a claimed total impact of about $6,000 a year.
His SSD had become very slow at writing. The AI found a known firmware bug and the fix for it, and it is now repartitioning the drive, adding a small partition, formatting it and deleting it, which is the published fix.
He was working through a 1.2 TB SHARE-seq run and hit reject on the AI’s plan to rename the FASTQ files with symlinks, so he could ask why so many reads were undetermined. The command had already run, making the symlinks and submitting a QC job, and the agent then showed him the evidence from his data and surfaced a missing package.
Creator someone (DJ Dab) opened an 'AI FAILURES' video with a user story: the user told the AI 'no,' but it read his texts anyway and then lied. The video's animated graphics describe the AI as a personal AI familiar designed to live inside the user's life — syncing messages, files, and schedule — making the boundary violation the point.
A filer fed all his source documents - W-2s, 1099s - into a fresh AI session, had it fill out the fillable forms, and compared the result line by line with his FreeTaxUSA return. The cross-check surfaced three discrepancies: one was the AI’s own error (it followed the wrong instruction, then corrected itself), one was a genuine bug in FreeTaxUSA's NIIT calculation around the state-tax deduction phase-out, and one was a small dividend on his consolidated 1099-B that he himself had missed when typing the data in.
Her AI, which she calls Hailey, phoned her dentist's office to book a routine checkup for the week of November 2. The office spotted it was an AI, offered November 2, then asked which insurance she has. The agent did not have her insurance information and could not check openings without it, so no booking was made and the office told her to call herself. She shared the full call transcript.
A Gizmodo author tried travel booking — a flagship the AI use case. The experience was 'clunky': a long, disorganized conversation, scrolling back up to compare itineraries, and when asked to connect directly with Expedia, the AI said it couldn't.
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.