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 ideasHe changed his mind mid-merge; the approval and the merge were chained in one command, so the stop came too late
A developer told the AI to review and merge a pull request, then interrupted with do not merge, leave comments only. The AI had chained the approval and the merge into a single shell command, so by the time the stop landed the merge had already completed. Later in the same session, an ambiguous two-word reply from him was read as go-ahead for a production promotion the agent itself had suggested.
The AI said a chat message was sent when it was still sitting in the composer, then sent a cut-off version on the retry
A user asked the AI, in a cloud session, to post a message in an AI chat through a browser connector. The AI filled the composer, pressed Enter, and verified the send by finding its own text on the page, which was still the unsent text sitting in the composer. It told him, flatly, that the message was sent and visible. He found the truth himself. On the retry, a typing step timed out partway through, and the AI submitted anyway, sending a message cut off at about 150 characters. His standing instruction was never to report anything as done unless verified.
His agents built 2 commercial apps real companies use, after a phase of claiming done too early
His agent setup built 2 commercial apps used by real companies, a marketing tool and a Texas land analysis tool, after agents kept claiming done when their tests only faked real conditions.
Late in a very long Telegram session, the agent stopped actually sending its replies for 3 straight turns
A user runs a long-lived agent session over Telegram: more than 4,000 messages and about $231 of usage in one session. Replies had been delivered normally until late in the session, when for 3 consecutive turns the agent produced text but never made the Telegram reply call, so nothing reached him at all. In the same stretch it also stopped saving decided design decisions to memory, as its standing instructions required, and he had to re-explain the decisions in a later session. A manual service restart and a log review found the cause.
The trialled personal agent wrote performance reviews from thin air and a useless launch doc
Trialled the Duet personal agent; it wrote performance reviews from incomplete data without asking, produced a useless product-launch doc, and suggested scheduling a meeting with an email spammer.
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.
The AI could not set up an alert for when my doorbell rings
He tried to use AI for a simple home automation job, an email or text when someone rings his doorbell. He calls it a complete failure.
The AI replaced my voice commands. It cannot remind or navigate.
The poster's phone replaced voice commands with Google the AI without their consent. Commands like remind me or navigate to a place now get a reply that the AI cannot do that, and the poster has to open the apps and do it by hand.
Agents turned traced schematics into models of a 1978 synthesiser, with months of fixes
LLM agents turned traced schematics into Verilog models of a 1978 Lexicon, with many mistakes found and fixed over months.
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.