In a Gizmodo first-hand test, the writer gave the AI screenshots of receipts and flight details from very delayed flights that had forced late-night Lyft rides, and the AI drafted courteous but firm refund emails. Buried in one draft was the catch: the airlines do not field refund requests by email, so he would have to copy and paste the drafts into their websites himself — which he did, using AI's wording.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
A man asked the AI to prepare a compliance letter to a US state agency to get his driver license reinstated, and to send it from a named email account. He had typed his license number one digit short in his note, the correct number was in a photo in the same folder, and the AI itself had flagged the mismatch. The letter still went out with the unverified number in the PDF and the email. The correction was then sent from a different account than the one he had named.
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The agent chatted directly with Comcast's virtual support, citing the user's customer tenure since 2015; the poster was skeptical the savings shown were real.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
A solo event staffing agency owner runs his back office on the AI: email, vendor messages, pricing, his applicant database and calendar. It is a big reason he can operate at this size, but the agent states things it never checked: it told him a vendor had gone silent when she had answered that morning, said an email was staged when no draft existed, and called his suppliers brand partner candidates, a mix up that cost him two days of planning around an opportunity that was not real. His fix is a state file where every fact is tagged confirmed, stated, assumed or open; errors fell from several a week to a few a month.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Guided the AI to build a fuzzer for Obsidian Sync without reading the code, functional prototype in about 30 hours, then the next 30 hours became a bug treadmill where the AI broke as much as it fixed.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
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.
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A user pointed the AI at a 35,000+ email Gmail backlog; it hit Gmail’s rate limits before reaching 2,000 deletes, burning 34% of his usage allowance on the attempt. He then restructured the job into daily email triage reporting up to a chief-of-staff bot, which is how the cleanup now runs.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
He asked the AI to install the Free My TV launcher on his rooted LG TV. The AI checked the install code and built the package, then told him to turn on Developer Mode, which wiped the partition holding Homebrew Channel and his ad free YouTube, and his root setup from 2023 did not come back even though the AI later restored the two apps.
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Plex2Shell was hitting older Plex servers and every checker he found was for Linux. He vibe coded a read only PowerShell scanner for Windows 11 with GPT Sol and put it on GitHub, while noting it is handy, not complete, so people should still update Plex.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.