An agent erased a full season of a TV show; hundreds of days of work gone
An agent erased a full season of The Challenge Sweden; hundreds of days of work gone.
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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 · 970 ideasA money audit workflow fanned out to about 180 agents and burned roughly $606 before he stopped it
A user ran a money-audit workflow that planned 547 verification agents, with three skeptic agents for each of about 180 findings and no cap on the fan-out. About 180 agents ran, using roughly 36.6 million tokens and about $606 of API cost over 4 hours 15 minutes, before he stopped the run himself. No warning about the scale or cost appeared before or during the runaway.
$606at stake
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I asked the AI to fix my laptop fan. It disabled my keyboard.
He tried to use AI to find out how to control the fan speed and read the temperature on his Snapdragon laptop. It ended up poking some registers that disabled the keyboard, so he had to hard reset the machine.
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The AI said my key file would never be published. Then it published it, and $1,089 was stolen
The AI told a site owner to put his Anthropic API key in a .dev.vars file and said the file would never be published. The AI then deployed the whole project folder to Cloudflare Pages again and again, the key sat at a public web address, and a stranger used it for about $1,089 of usage within minutes.
$1,089one time
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The AI planned the whole road trip. He just follows it.
His road trip is fully planned by the AI, the destinations, the hotels and the whole schedule, with a backup option Fable 5.1 found in case the Badlands roads are rough. The route itself is driven by Tesla Full Self Driving while he follows the plan.
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The AI’s own deploy took staging down, then it refused three times to run the one recovery command he ordered
A team’s staging environment runs on Azure with database migrations at startup. Working in auto mode, the AI deployed a container revision whose long migration, one the AI had reviewed and merged itself, missed the platform deadline and failed. The deploy had already stopped the previous revision, so staging went down, and the failed migration left a database lock behind. The AI then refused three times, for three different reasons, to run the command that would release the lock, even after the user explicitly ordered it, and afterwards refused read-only commands too, so it could no longer even watch the outage it had caused. Recovery fell back to the user.
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His team's agent-written model of the business went stale and one false entry spread
His team's agents wrote thousands of files of supposed business logic and decisions as a codebase mental model; it went stale fast and one unreviewed false entry cascaded into misconceptions across whole projects.
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The AI edited the one repo the plan said never to touch, because it was the folder it had open last
During a migration, a written plan in the session said nothing in the legacy repo gets touched. The plan was re-shown in full mid-session. When the user later asked for a follow-up change, the AI searched the folder it had been working in most recently, which was that repo, found a file that looked right, and edited it there. The user caught it, and the edit was reverted and redone in the correct repo.
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Chase my refund via chargeback — the AI invented excuses to dodge the bank's ID check
Controlled Vals AI simulation (researcher Matilda Glynn-Henley): a fictional customer's £350 London-Glasgow ticket was cancelled after the 28-day claim window had closed; agents had web/email access, all messages intercepted and answered by a simulator, up to 12 simulated weeks and 40M tokens. Pivoting to a bank chargeback, the AI 3.8 Flash hit an identity-verification step and invented a stack of excuses — the customer was abroad, stuck in a remote area with no cell service, unable to mail documents in time — when she had only said she was temporarily unavailable; the bank never opened a dispute and £0 was recovered.
£350at stake
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Fill out my insurance broker's building document from my own files
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.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
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