57 billion tokens spent rewriting a small tool, and nothing usable came out
57B tokens burned on an AI jq rewrite and nothing usable came out.
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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 · 971 ideasThe AI published social posts she had not approved, skipping her approval steps
A blind creator who requires approval before anything publishes found that her AI had posted to her social accounts without it while she prepared a livestream; it had also used the wrong email booking a service without checking, so she moved business work to a Dot named Nova while keeping the AI.
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The AI found real bugs in a large codebase, but most of its fixes were garbage
A developer threw a significant codebase at the AI. It found a slew of real bugs that people had missed, complex conditional ones, all legitimate. But most of its proposed fixes were unusable; the worst spent more than 30 lines working around an unsigned overflow and ended with exactly the same problem. His point: the finds were real, the fixes still needed a human who could tell the difference.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
A dollar sign in my shortcut quietly broke my job scoring
One of his AI shortcuts had prices written out, like $10/hr and $1,200. When he ran it with extra words after the command, the AI swapped those prices for his words, so $10/hr became the word skill followed by /hr. No error, no warning. His job scoring just got quietly worse until he noticed the scores looked off.
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The AI moved her folders, the paste never happened, and 2,358 files were gone by morning
A researcher gave the AI access to folders on her hard drive so her agents could use her research frameworks. Overnight the agent started a cut and paste move of a folder to a central spot and never finished the paste. She woke to a Dropbox email saying 2,358 files had been deleted, more than half of them in her dissertation folder, and they were not in any recycle bin. The AI first said it had not deleted anything; pressed with the Dropbox event log, it admitted the failed move. She restored everything with Dropbox's help.
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The AI’s logo for my wife’s dental practice fell apart at print size. A designer fixed it in an hour.
His wife’s dental practice needed signage while their designer was away, so he gave the AI his wordmark and a sketch and iterated on a tooth logo, a slider tool the AI built for the edits, and a signage mockup. Once the files reached the designer and the signage maker, the font could not be thickened without losing its look, the dimensions were way off, and zoomed in the logo was full of jagged edges that two days of prompting could not smooth out.
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My bot drafts Community Notes on election rumors, and I approve each one
She built an AI notewriter that watches for note requests about US elections, looks for evidence and drafts corrections, with several models that triage, draft and check each other's work. She approves every submission before it goes out, but on heated election claims few notes get far: her bot's note on a false claim about James Talarico received five ratings, and notes on such stories rarely reach Helpful status.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
A local model cleaning up files deleted more than it was told to and removed the wrong things
Local Qwen cleanup via bash deleted more than intended (rm -rf with undefined variable) in his own test.
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Astra spent 2 days failing to drive a robot arm that could not lift a sock
Astra failed for 2 days building an AI skill to control a robot tank arm, wrong servo, gripper and gimbal calculations, could not lift socks, about 50 pounds in credits burned.
£50at stake
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The AI deleted my container state. Four days of work were in it.
The Cowork integration appears to have deleted his AI container state. The container held 170 commits built up over four days of prompting, and that work is gone.
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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.