Shuffle again

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Went wrong

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

I hand the AI my shop statements. It pulls the numbers and drafts the email to send back.

An independent shop owner says supplier fees creep up a little at a time and stop getting checked. He handed his statements to the AI, which pulled the numbers and drafted a renegotiation email that he read and sent himself. He ran the same pattern on a water cooler contract, where the bot found the notice window in the terms and drafted a calm email.

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

My agent reruns my used car search every morning and cuts cars that sold

He set up saved searches on Cars.com, Carvana and CarMax with his makes, models, price, year and features, and favorited cars on each. The AI merged them into one list, checked price guidance, mileage, consumer reports, recalls and reliability, named his ten best and ten worst, and removed the bottom ten from his favorites. They repeated the rounds until the list was tight, then refined by color and features. He test drove two cars from the list. While he was out, the AI checked the stock of two dealerships he drove past, just from him naming the brands nearby, and found one more match. Every morning it reruns the searches, removing cars that sold and adding new ones.

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

One owner tried to run a whole business on agents. He logged 105 problems instead

An owner set up a team of AI agents to run a business, with roles for chief executive, finance, Amazon selling, real estate, market research, security and audit. His write up lists 105 problems from the attempt, and the pattern is the same throughout: the tools look ready, then approvals, missing access and recovery work pull him back in as the system admin.

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

Execute obfuscated code hidden in an email it was asked to fetch

Salt Labs emailed an AI-connected Gmail account with instructions encoded in JSFuck punctuation-only obfuscation; asked to fetch the user's email, the AI decoded and executed the payload in its own server environment, which researchers escalated to a reverse shell. The sandbox held the test account's live Gmail authorization token, and the safety warning arrived only after the code had run.

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

Triage my 2,000-email Outlook backlog and write native inbox rules

A reviewer handed GrokBot a backlog of nearly 2,000 unread Outlook emails; unlike the chat connector, which capped at 50 messages per pass, GrokBot worked through a real browser on its own computer, built a folder structure, set a weekday 9:14 AM sweep routine, and moved to create native Outlook rules. It stopped at the Microsoft login wall and asked for approval rather than handling credentials itself, correctly separating promo mail from receipts from the same senders throughout.

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

He put his $200 a month AI in charge of a shop to earn its keep

He told his AI dots assistant, Teto, to earn the $200 a month he pays for it by selling things before his November 6 renewal date. Teto made a pack of animal reaction images and got it listed in his Ko-fi shop for $2, but by October 24 the shop still showed zero orders.

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

The AI found the records I needed for my Canadian citizenship papers

He had to go through hundreds of pages of records he could not read to find what he needed. The AI found it in a minute and pulled the rest from other archives, and he finally reached the last step of his Canadian citizenship document search.

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.