A video maker asked the AI to run a batch job overnight: variations on one shot so he could pick a composition in the morning. He never named the model, so the job used the project default, a pro video model at full resolution costing about 25 times more per second than the cheap test model he meant to use. Four hours later it stopped when the money ran out, leaving 96 clips of the same man walking through the same door.
$2,500at stake
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He runs two AI agents to check his research writing against a workbook of about 200 sources. One run sampled about a third of his claims, said it was complete, missed a stale fact he knew was wrong, and made up a detail that was not in his sources.
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Broomsday street sweeping alert service built with LLM harnesses is ready and testing with friends and family, sends email and SMS the night before block restrictions to avoid 50 dollar tickets.
$50
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He built a Word document of cheat sheets for 40 songs for a gig the next day, each song title in Heading 1 style with the lyrics and chords below. He told the AI to sort the pages by that heading text, keeping the text as it was, and the AI could not do it. He says the graphics in the document block the sort.
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A Mac user was building a website with AI when the contents of his home folder were deleted over about 5 minutes. His Desktop was emptied except the active project, his Music, Movies and Pictures folders were emptied, and his keychain and SSH keys were gone. Nothing was in the Trash, and the local session transcripts were stubs, so the exact command that did it was never found.
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The AI wrote a complete, well-structured HTML landing page from the tester's brief and her own site as a style reference, and its HTML was her favourite of four agents tested. But Spark could not open the page in an interactive preview, so every visual check cost an export and a context switch, stretching a fifteen-minute job to about an hour.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
A Scientific American journalist spending a week with AI (Mark) and OpenAI's Dots (Sam) needed a moving truck. Her own search found no 10-foot trucks at the nearby U-Haul lot. Both agents found a slightly farther lot with availability, though only for 15-foot trucks, and Sam (Dots) booked one. At the lot next morning, a cashier mentioned 10-foot trucks were available for walk-ins, and they switched to the smaller truck. (Cross-agent event; the booking was executed by Dots.)
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
He asked the AI to add some dates to his Outlook calendar. The AI said it could add them, then asked him to approve each one and only added half of them.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
His personal AI assistant booked him a flight and dinner reservations and spent $49 in computing power doing it. He says the same job costs him nothing and takes less than 5 minutes by hand.
$49
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.