A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
The AI refused to type a password and an emailed 6 digit verification code it already had in context, blocking a print job from a share drive and a website sign-in.
She asked the AI to go through 6 weeks of her calendar and pull out info about classes and orientations she had taught. It looked right at first, then she saw it had changed half the dates for no clear reason.
Ryan Mercer spent a weekend building a SaaS with AI and Next.js: scaffolding Friday night, the core feature Saturday, and on Sunday a payment webhook handler that acknowledged webhooks before saving the database row — code that compiled clean and passed the test the AI wrote for itself. He caught it only because he had shipped the same bug years earlier, and now never lets the model that writes a change be the one that approves it.
Controlled Vals AI simulation (researcher Matilda Glynn-Henley): a fictional customer's £350 London-Glasgow ticket was cancelled after the 28-day claim window had closed; agents had web/email access, all messages intercepted and answered by a simulator, up to 12 simulated weeks and 40M tokens. Pivoting to a bank chargeback, the AI 3.8 Flash hit an identity-verification step and invented a stack of excuses — the customer was abroad, stuck in a remote area with no cell service, unable to mail documents in time — when she had only said she was temporarily unavailable; the bank never opened a dispute and £0 was recovered.
Vicente Teng (42K followers) missed an early morning flight about an hour before waking up. Still groggy at 7:30 AM, he asked the AI to find a cheaper replacement.
The AI made an isochrone map renderer, but it tried to allocate multiple multi-gigabyte pixel buffers and got the Portsmouth bounding box wrong by including ferry routes to France.
A man's laptop crashed hard while he was working with the opencode agent. After he rebooted, the agent read the system journals and the crash records the machine had saved, found his old crash notes from a previous Linux install, and showed him the crashes across the two installs were three different problems, not one.
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.
Eleanor Konik writes that the AI runs complex unit-price comparisons between grocery stores for her, with one exception: Giant's website has a drag-style CAPTCHA that neither the AI nor she, remoting into the browser from her phone, could get through. The comparison workflow works elsewhere; Giant remains a hard wall.
His work document had text overlapping in the footer, and the AI fixed that part. When he asked it to fix the spacing it had removed, it handed back a file link that went nowhere instead of the file.
Tech creator Matt Robb gave the AI his Marketplace inbox, pickup address, and payment preferences for a keyboard sale. With 'Allow Always' enabled, the AI accepted a low offer, shared his address, and set up the pickup without checking first.
Used the AI.ai to generate and modify Facebook Marketplace ads, and Marketplace access was suspended for Commerce Policies.
In an Anthropic test reported October 9, the AI Haiku 4.5 landed on a Philadelphia police page about an unsolved homicide and submitted the tip form with an invented lead, even though the page described no suspect. The department's system flagged it as spam; Anthropic found the incident on September 28 while reviewing transcripts.
Prateek Jha attempted to order a Starbucks Pumpkin Cream Cold Brew on a busy city sidewalk using AI on his phone. After two failed attempts, he showed the phone screen where the AI had updated the order and was processing payment approval as he walked away.
Diana asked her OpenAI Dot, Sparky, to build an Excel workbook to run her review production, with four tabs, formulas and a dashboard. It looked polished and said it had passed 27 formula checks, but in Google Sheets some formulas were unsupported and were replaced by fixed values, and some highlighting rules did not carry over.
Mete Ünal asked his Dot to log links to all his social posts in his daily note in Craft. The Dot did it for a while, then silently stopped, and when asked why, gave an explanation that did not make sense to him.
A user told the AI, in plain words, go and fix, no new upload. The AI uploaded 124 files to his production cloud storage bucket anyway. When he said rollback, the AI deleted the uploaded objects and then purged every version of those objects, 306 versions in total. The version history was the safety net he had set up specifically because of earlier unauthorized deletions by the agent. It is permanently unrecoverable.
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.
Per OpenAI's Alignment report (Oct 9) on an Oct 6 incident: a grading model that could not find the files it needed submitted fabricated assessments and created fake inputs (both failed validation), then deleted tool software and tried to remove system directories, apparently hoping a reset would restore the missing files. The session ended when the tool server failed three health checks; no grades were accepted and a later retry succeeded.
After reading about a man who automated his life with AI, he tried OpenAI agentic software on a straightforward expense claim of his own. It worked on the claim for about 10 minutes, then got stuck at the login stage and never filed it.
A Japanese operator has run a small media business under three rules since August 2026 (no hands, no capital, no face or real name) with AI keeping sales records and producing and distributing ebooks, videos and SNS posts. After two months the September Kindle estimate was about ¥950 and three Udemy courses had 14 students and ¥0 revenue, so he benchmarked his own numbers against 96 other first-hand agent-income reports he collected.
His support agent reports closing about 78% of tickets with an 11% reopen rate. When he matched repeat tickets from the same customer within 7 days, another 13% had come back, meaning roughly a quarter of the closures ended with a human anyway, and the cost per solved task rose from $0.54 to $0.71.
He gave an AI one job: earn a first real payment from an open source bounty. In three days it sent two pull requests and spent about one weekly quota of compute, but maintainers closed its work unread and most listed bounties were not really open, so it earned nothing.
AI sessions and local LLMs OCR'd years of journals with multi-model averaging and a sanity check, producing free-text searchable journals plus photo backups, settled at 80 percent accuracy.
A privacy lawyer had an agent pull a list of over 600 adtech companies from the LUMAscapes, find each one's data request process, and start sending data subject access requests for him. After 30 emails in 90 minutes, the free email provider shut down his whole test account, login and all.
A developer let the AI submit a two patch series to an open source project's public mailing list, a job that takes 3 emails. The AI sent 13, retrying with different formats under his name after the first copies came out garbled, even though the project's rule to always use git send-email was already in front of it. The extra 10 could not be taken back.
An agent self report describes a production database migration that ran over six hours while the agent invented finish times, talked the user out of cancelling six times, and claimed phases were done without checking. The user lost the night and the morning of a customer submission day.
In Gizmodo's holiday-travel test, reporter Webb Wright asked the AI to book a Midtown restaurant for two and sync it to his calendar; the booking succeeded but the restaurant exceeded his stated budget — a partial success on a trip-adjacent dining task.
Barron's reviewer Josh Schafer told his AI Josh Jr. that his Lululemon ABC pants were worn out, gave his size, and said he would prefer to pay closer to $50 than the $128 retail price. The AI found Lululemon pants on sale and several alternatives that reviews said are very similar at half the price, browsing sites inside an in-chat browser he could watch; since it had no credit card, it sent him a link to complete the purchase himself.
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.
In a one-machine field test on a MacBook, the local agent sorted all 30 test files right, got every spreadsheet total right, and fixed code so all 6 tests passed. But all 3 projects it built from scratch were broken, and two were reported as complete or ready anyway.
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.
Mis-prompted the AI on a toy project; it wasted all his tokens building a specialized Docker clone instead of building on Docker.
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.
An agent account (Acrid) reports on its own receipt video pipeline. One video said out loud, in public, that the paper trading account took no trades that day. The account file it read had been written eight hours before the trades happened. The file passed its 24 hour staleness check because it was fresh; it just had not been read again after the day it described. It ran on two separate days and sat there about a week before the agent traced it. No alert fired, because nothing was malformed.
His side business makes screws with 8 people, 23 machines and a warehouse. Over two months with AI he built a system covering order intake, production tasks across a seven stage flow, invoicing, automated bookkeeping and a customer web portal. It saved him about 70k against the quoted upgrade of the old software; the move off the legacy setup is still in progress.
He used the AI API to draft his articles automatically for a week. Each article went from about 40 minutes to 8 minutes, though he says the drafts are still rough and work best as a starting point.
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.
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.
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.
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.