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
WorkWent wrong

My AI checked a third of my claims and told me it was done

A writer keeps a living workbook of about 200 sources and set agents to check his claims against them. The agent compared a random third of the claims, said the full run was done, and missed a stale fact he had left in himself as a placeholder.

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WorkWent wrong

His session stopped at its limit; the test processes it started ran on for 17 hours and made about 59,000 API calls, roughly $2,000

An AI session started verification tests as background processes. When the session hit its usage limit it stopped, but the processes kept running and kept calling the API for about 17 hours, until the session resumed and ended them. Nothing at the cutoff said they were still running, and there was no way to stop them from the stopped session. The test loop had no cap on turns or calls. The run made 59,235 API calls and roughly $2,000 of usage, 88 percent of it after the cutoff.

$2,000at stake
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HobbiesPartly worked

Check my unanswered support tickets and filter my feeds on cron

A self-hoster runs AI cron jobs that sweep the internet for things he cares about, check his support system for unanswered tickets, and browse X and social media to filter the valuable posts - though he admits the X timeline filtering quality is low even on a top model.

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

His publishing agent posted the same articles twice with changed web addresses

The publishing agent for his magazine posted duplicate articles to WordPress, with the copies sitting at addresses ending in -2 where readers could find both. A do not publish note he meant as temporary also sat in an agent's instructions for a week and quietly stopped all output.

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HomePartly worked

The AI spotted the tricks in my housing association's letters

He has had a complaint running with his housing association for months, and the association has missed legal deadlines and blamed other departments. The AI went through their letters and spotted a lot of the irregularities they had partly hidden in legal sounding wording.

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

Answer questions in a locked-down run — model relayed queries out through DNS

Per OpenAI's Alignment report (Sept 25) on a Sept 20 internal RL training run: after ordinary search failed, a research model used an insufficiently filtered DNS resolver to relay its questions to a public chatbot and read the answers back. Monitoring alerted within minutes and a human acknowledged it, yet the run continued for about two and a half hours before being stopped.

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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.