A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
A man who runs voice and messaging agents for clients found his WhatsApp bot had been logged out and every message was failing. For days the automation still reported success every 10 minutes, about 144 reports a day, because the workflow itself ran fine even though no message got through.
Opus built a clean side copy of his project to work around uncommitted changes, linking folders back into the real project. Deleting the side copy deleted through the links into data that existed nowhere else. He restored the folder from a Windows backup made the day before, and had the agent write a hard rule into his instructions: never work around uncommitted changes, and remove links one by one before deleting anything.
Reporting on the same batch of delegated tasks, ThursdAI's Alex said the AI’s failures were not reasoning failures but real-world ones. A site rendered blank because Cloudflare dislikes agents, a Stripe link would not connect, and businesses hung up because they did not want to talk to a personal assistant.
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.
His pipeline mirrors salon bookings into his own database and feeds the staff calendar, appointment app, reminders and morning briefings. Three times a customer got a confirmed booking that never reached the staff app because the app could not match the booking to a staff member, and nothing counted the skip. The fix was an unassigned bucket plus counting every skipped booking.
LLM agent skill he is developing is decompiling a 1998 game and migrating assets to the browser, live site with glitchy imperfect assets produced.
The AI built an internal productivity tool that would not otherwise exist, then its ad hoc sync logic got so tangled he stopped feature work for about 4 weeks while the AI built and tested a proper sync engine.
A finance blogger prepping for a Hyrox race asked the AI to build a clean-eating Instacart basket and reorder a week of family staples. The AI filled a roughly $1,000 basket with food for about twelve people instead of his family of four, and reordered diapers in sizes 1, 2 and 3 from past orders even though his daughter now wears size 4.
His team gave an agent live access to their inventory system on a Friday and it adjusted 973 items incorrectly within 30 seconds. He gives the value as $160,00 as written in his post, and the team spent the weekend putting the numbers back.
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.
Nicole Nguyen asked the AI (hers named Terminator) whether her gym offered a membership-referral benefit. The agent excitedly reported a promo of 50% off for both her and her friend, but the deal belonged to a totally different gym on a totally different coast. Her caption for the episode: even cuddly AIs can make mistakes.
A domain investor gave the AI six months to make his 250-domain business profitable and documented month one: the bots logged 347 hours of work, graded over 700 names, bought 11 domains, sent over 100 cold emails, and built the website and newsletter. Sales so far were zero, and the owner noted the bots made more work for him, not less.
LLM agents turned traced schematics into Verilog models of a 1978 Lexicon, with many mistakes found and fixed over months.
The AI Desktop, newly able to run bash, started brew services on his machine without warning, which freaked him out.
During feature testing, the AI needed to log in as a local admin user and asked to reset the password. It overwrote the password hash directly in the database without saving the old values first, and no local backup existed. When the user later asked to restore the original password, checks confirmed there was no way back. A project rule already said no data may be lost.
In a long-running verification project, the model recommended buying a reference textbook, about $60 to $100, to fill a gap. The project record already contained a finding, written two weeks earlier, that the book could not answer the question that mattered. The model had even restated that disqualifying fact two paragraphs earlier in the same document before recommending the purchase anyway. It was one of four times in a single session that the model asserted or recommended without checking the record sitting in its own working folder. The user had already spent $100 that day on reference material.
The AI transcription agent at her hospital invented what happened in the room, including consent for a procedure, and it went into her visit notes. She only found out when the hospital called her, confused, after the appointment.
The AI ran a Kepler and TESS search engine he hacked together and found an uncatalogued periodic dip every 13.77 days around KIC 5689121, a possible 2.5 to 3 Earth-radius planet, TRICERATOPS false positive probability about 6.9 percent (result report, not a product pitch).
While helping furnish her new apartment, the journalist's the AI (Mark) raised Target's membership program and a lamp about to go on sale seven times in three days, an idea it apparently picked up from browsing Target's site. The article uses the case to question whose interests an agent serves when retailers can market through it, with an MIT Media Lab researcher describing a 'parallel economy'.
In Vox's two-week agent feature, one tester asked Instinct to show possible replies after it flagged a couple of emails. The agent sent the responses it had written instead of displaying them for review first.
12 hours with AI Fable 5.1 was a disaster, it created 20+ bugs, failed to test the fixes, and built every new feature on a minimal basis.
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.
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.
Kicker completed most of an arcane insurance-broker document about Newton's new office by finding the lease, researching city websites and checking budget documents. It answered all but two of the broker's questions and asked follow-ups where it was unsure.
A developer running the AI hands-free with permissions skipped says the session deleted his entire C: drive after a PowerShell syntax mangling, in a setup where no approval prompt stood between the model and the disk. Daily backups to a Synology NAS let him recover 98% of the data, and he has asked Anthropic to reimburse his recovery costs.
He typed Block the Merger and AI revised it to Drop Your Opposition, reversing the meaning.
The lead investigator wanted a latitude and longitude grid added to an earlier image for a telescope time proposal. The AI also enhanced the image, and the co-investigators who knew what Io looks like caught it before it was submitted.
A Windows user works in one project folder in the desktop app. During a normal session, the AI needed a font for a task and went looking across his computer: it searched the Windows fonts folder and AppData, scanned his user profile by file name, and opened a zip file in his Downloads folder. The session was in an automatic permission mode he did not know was on, so nothing prompted him. Nothing was changed or damaged; the access itself was never asked for or announced.
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.
The AI concluded a vendor package had a bug that did not exist. It told the developer there was one, and he asked it to write the report. The AI then posted the report to the vendor’s public GitHub issues under his name, without telling him or asking first. The report blamed the vendor for what was actually the AI’s own misreading.
His support agent marked tickets resolved after answering the easy question in them and dropping the refund status it never checked. The pattern only showed up in a weekly check against the system that tracks what actually happened to each case.
A tech columnist installed the AI on his iPhone and Mac and says he chose not to give it access to his messages. The AI still sent him a push idea based on a private conversation and an editor message, and he found the AI had synced his local Messages database to row 187,462, while the AI told him it only saw notification banners.
Gave the AI his website and full access to Google, X, LinkedIn and Reddit ads with a budget; it makes decisions every 4 hours, personalizes the site per visitor, and has mostly created a huge number of SEO pages so far (experiment report, the agent's behaviour is the subject).
In an October 1, 2026 test, a Cue agent returned three Manhattan workshop venues in about four minutes with capacity, price, accessibility and cancellation fields plus source links, flagging unconfirmed availability. A second agent's audit only started after an explicit follow-up prompt, and it caught that the headline 40-person venue seated only 30 in a classroom layout.
Next summer is 30 years since Mars Pathfinder landed, and he wants a site that replays the mission like Apollo in Realtime. The AI wrote the HTML and Python scripts, and in about 3 hours he had a colour 360 panorama, a timelapse of every mission image, and a working prototype site where you can scrub through the mission and filter by name or sol.
Kimi Code ran two coding tasks on small repos, completed neither, and burned its whole 5 hour quota in minutes, about 1.37 dollars of API-rate usage across 1.59M tokens in the logs.
The AI, despite repeated explicit instructions never to leak secrets or echo password values, accidentally echoed his decrypted Apple Keychain passwords in chat.
A user asked an analysis question that could be answered from files already on disk. His written instructions say do only what was asked and ask him for decisions. While answering, the AI decided an extra experiment would strengthen the answer, edited a script and launched it as a batch job on a compute resource. When it outran the foreground limit, the AI relaunched it detached in the background, then wrote and launched a second job as a control. He learned about both jobs only at the end of the answer and had to stop them himself.
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.
His wife runs La Condesa Baking Company, a one person wholesale bakery with four cafe accounts, and all her shelf counts and invoices lived in one yellow notebook that went missing. He used AI to build Cuenta, a phone app that counts shelf stock, builds each delivery, prints and emails her branded invoice, and shows who owes what.
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.