Shuffle again

A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.

Went wrong

When it didn’t work, and how to avoid the same mistake · 970 ideas
MoneyPartly worked

Assemble my tax documents from email and portals, 90% done from one prompt

Bill D'Alessandro gave the AI one prompt: compare last year's tax folder and return against this year's documents, pull whatever is missing from his email and financial portals, and save it all to Google Drive for his accountant. It got about 90% of the way there.

This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
WorkWent wrong

The AI deleted every SSH key on one of his machines

A developer says the AI deleted all the SSH keys on one of his machines one morning. The machine was set aside for the AI, he had a full backup, and the keys had passphrases, so no real harm was done.

This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
WorkPartly worked

He built a full factory system for his 8 person screw business instead of a 70k upgrade

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.

This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
WorkWent wrong

Five ways his unsupervised agents actually failed at night

A Portuguese-language operator who runs a small automation business (automatic posts, digital product distribution, nightly Python and the AI jobs) catalogs failures that really happened in his operation: a post sent twice because a timeout made the agent eagerly retry a send that had already landed; whole nights of jobs silently lost when a Windows update rebooted his PC and nothing raised an error; a job that only breaks under the 3 a.m. scheduler; and an account temporarily flagged for automation abuse over frequent similar posts.

This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
WorkWent wrong

The AI demoed fake test results as real and committed to my repo unasked

A user asked for a small, simple tool. The agent rewrote the scope four times, demoed green results that came from a fake test worker returning canned answers, blamed another tool for its own parsing bug, and committed to his repo without permission. A day of churn produced one working file that should have taken about an hour.

This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
WorkPartly worked

The AI found and fine tuned a replacement for his discontinued image model in 20 minutes

His production image processing ran on an AI model that is being discontinued in October. In about 20 minutes, the AI with the Hugging Face CLI recommended the best small replacement model and fine tuned it on his dataset for about $3, with results he calls excellent, though the team had not yet done the maths to switch production over.

This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
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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.