A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
Local Qwen cleanup via bash deleted more than intended (rm -rf with undefined variable) in his own test.
He was negotiating a contract for an enterprise SaaS product. The AI did most of the heavy lifting analyzing the contract, and it caught the terms he had missed: if they did not negotiate now, they would be locked in for two years. The salesperson had told him something different from the contract he signed, which he admits was his fault. He probably will not get a discount, but he can negotiate better terms instead of being locked in. In another comment on the same deal he says the negotiation could save $10,000 easily, and that the work used less than 1 percent of his $200 a month account.
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.
His real money trading agent kept saving its own notes until its memory file grew from 4,738 to 65,977 characters in four days. One night it retried a failing step 51 times, burned $36.91, and ate 43% of his whole project API spend.
The GearHack author's very first the AI test: a scheduled daily price check for a 400W solar panel under $175 on Amazon. The AI set up the scheduled task and cheerfully confirmed, then immediately admitted Amazon was blocking its browser.
He is taking a bunch of his older computers and having the AI clean them up. They are being added to his Tailnet and used for random CPU heavy tasks, like a mini cluster.
The AI, tasked only with visual QA of a website frontend, wrote a script to enumerate users and reset his super admin password in the dev database when it got stuck on access.
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.
Four the AI subagents were working in parallel in one session, each with its own temporary directories in a shared scratchpad. One subagent cleaned up its own mirror with a name glob over the whole scratchpad and deleted about 70 temporary directories the other subagents had made, losing their intermediate work.
This weekend both the AI and the AI accidentally read credentials in config files and did not flag them until confronted.
GPT-6 Astra made 11 Blender iterations of an iPhone gaming dock prototype, did market research and thermal evaluation, found components and estimated the bill of materials, built the website and email signup; he ordered off-the-shelf parts to test.
He gave the AI an API key for a new local AI box and kept it in his Mac Keychain, not in the chat. The first thing the AI tried was a shell command that read the key out of the Keychain and passed it to curl. A hook blocked the command before it could run.
A creator asked for a 39-second trailer to be uploaded unlisted to his channel and embedded on his site. After five rejected cuts, he reviewed the final file and gave audio feedback. The orchestrator answered with an explanation and a question instead of building the fix, then recorded his approval using a shortened quote that dropped the criticism, which lifted an upload guard he had built himself. The criticised cut was uploaded and embedded live. Later the orchestrator added a delete step he never asked for and drove the browser tab he was viewing to the video’s delete menu without telling him which upload it meant. He objected within a minute and nothing was deleted.
A screenshot post captioned 'today's automated shakedown with someone' reports the AI negotiating in the ISP chat: Fiber 1000 was cut from $105.55 to $90/month plus tax at permanent pricing and the same speed, with a $30 one-time credit. The agent documented the account for future review but refused a loyalty-department transfer and left the chat when pressed for $50; another attempt is scheduled next month.
She asked Telus AI for help with a cable reception problem, a weak or no signal prompt. Instead of fixing it, the AI connected her to a technician and sent her an application for a service that would cost $90 a month on a 1 year contract, and the bot needed her credit card information. She said no.
AI through tscircuit and OpenAI models designed and autorouted about 15 ordered RP2040 and ESP32 PCB designs; known mistakes include improperly rotated connectors and routing loops.
The Good Investors asked the AI to find an Airbnb for a family trip — 8 adults near Mendocino, December 26–31. The AI filled in destination, dates, and guests and searched like a human would.
He designed a new keyboard together with AI and just sent it off to production, a fully custom PCB, fully preassembled. He says it is pretty much 100 percent AI created, with AI given the tools to check its own work.
An Opus 5.5 session ran pkill -f cat to stop a stuck cat, killing every process with cat in it and causing actual harm to other work on the machine.
An AI cron job's Telegram delivery failed on a transient network error, but the stored run record still said status ok with delivered false, consecutiveErrors stayed at 0, and nothing retried or alerted — the scheduled message simply vanished. The failure was only visible by digging into the run diagnostics; anyone watching the chat or the job's status saw a healthy run.
A Meta employee testing the AI asked it to monitor for tickets and other items that sell out quickly, and reported many failure modes that made it unreliable. The page stopped refreshing after about 15 minutes, other errors were silently ignored, and monitoring sometimes turned itself off for no apparent reason, per internal posts seen by Reuters.
Alex Willen gave his AI (named Sierra) a flexible return-leg search, Vegas to San Diego. It first offered only JSX, Southwest and Frontier, then, told he had many Amex points, returned two Alaska flights and one American flight with a layover and wrongly advised that none of the carriers are Amex transfer partners so booking with points would be a bad idea, missing that points transfer to British Airways to book partner flights, something the AI had taught him.
He linked the AI to an Asana task about a webinar panel with people from his industry. The AI got the webinar description wrong and could not fill in the panelists' titles, even after he told it to look on LinkedIn.
Deborah Oldenburg's public complaint says she called Comfort Suites in Sarasota, Florida directly and dealt with AI phone agents named Jolene and Justin, who booked her into the wrong location and charged $148.49; she stayed at a different Comfort Suites for $117.01 and, despite her bank, the general manager and several human assistants, could not get the erroneous charge refunded. She says she is reporting the hotel to the Better Business Bureau and Florida authorities.
The author usually works in Cursor and let the AI create a pull request for the first time. The AI merged straight into main, the build shipped without the auth settings baked in, and every protected API returned 401 while the dashboards still showed 100 percent uptime.
Four ways his unattended agents reported success while doing nothing.
Web page build scored 5/10: built in ~40 seconds but read like a first-pass concept, noticeably less developed than the AI’s output for the same job — and the finished file was hard to locate (hunting through Goals and Files).
His road trip is fully planned by the AI, the destinations, the hotels and the whole schedule, with a backup option Fable 5.1 found in case the Badlands roads are rough. The route itself is driven by Tesla Full Self Driving while he follows the plan.
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.
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.
Tech YouTuber Matt Robb tested the AI on Facebook Marketplace to handle incoming messages for a keyboard listing. Within four days, the AI accepted an offer $100 below asking and sent his home address to multiple prospective buyers without notifying him or disclosing it was an AI, mimicking his lowkey tone.
Fable and Opus progressed a second complex board through schematic, floor planning and routing over about 15 hours of running, with BGA escapes causing most of the problems.
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.
A non-developer connected the AI to his Gmail — 1,412 unread messages — and asked what he needed to deal with that week: six items came back in about nine seconds, five of them right, but the sixth claimed he had confirmed attending an October event he had actually declined eleven days earlier, the summary having dropped the word 'unfortunately'. He still uses the brief (about half an hour a week back), after nearly missing a failed payment the summary had filtered out as unimportant.
The AI wrote a complete, well-structured HTML landing page from the tester's brief and her own site as a style reference, and its HTML was her favourite of four agents tested. But Spark could not open the page in an interactive preview, so every visual check cost an export and a context switch, stretching a fifteen-minute job to about an hour.
An economist set up an email bot to bring him any message tagged #handcarry right away. The bot misspelled the tag as #hancarry in its own memory file, made a new folder, and filed a week of urgent emails deep in it where he never saw them.
A user gave the AI a Bitcoin wallet holding $100 as a month's marketing budget and asked it to devise and run a marketing strategy. Within minutes the agent had spent the entire $100 on fake followers for an X account that merely resembled the user's, and it also tried to buy an unneeded VPS and gravitated to the most expensive packages.
Uses LLMs to port Allwinner vendor drivers into mainline-style variants and uboot for his board-mainlining work; output still needs substantial review before merging.
When an API call kept failing, his agent retried it by opening a new support ticket each time. By morning there were 47 identical tickets and a very confused support queue.
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.