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 · 971 ideas
HobbiesWent wrong

The AI could not sort the pages of my gig cheat sheet

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.

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

He runs AI agents in parallel, and loose runs cost him a night

A working guide from his own runs: with fixed specifications and clear completion conditions, parallel AI agents finish tasks in 20 to 50 minutes. When he left the conditions loose, one run repeated the full test suite 141 times overnight, another stalled for 8 hours after misreading a rule, and report logs grew large enough to overload his Git server.

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

Re-do my taxes with AI and catch a bug in FreeTaxUSA itself

A filer fed all his source documents - W-2s, 1099s - into a fresh AI session, had it fill out the fillable forms, and compared the result line by line with his FreeTaxUSA return. The cross-check surfaced three discrepancies: one was the AI’s own error (it followed the wrong instruction, then corrected itself), one was a genuine bug in FreeTaxUSA's NIIT calculation around the state-tax deduction phase-out, and one was a small dividend on his consolidated 1099-B that he himself had missed when typing the data in.

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

Someone put a backdoor in my website. The AI helped me clean it out.

He opened his site dashboard and found a plugin he never installed. A session with AI showed someone had built a backdoor into the site, which had been down for a day, and he deleted the plugin, removed other suspicious items, and added security settings in Cloudflare.

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

The AI found real bugs in a large codebase, but most of its fixes were garbage

A developer threw a significant codebase at the AI. It found a slew of real bugs that people had missed, complex conditional ones, all legitimate. But most of its proposed fixes were unusable; the worst spent more than 30 lines working around an unsigned overflow and ended with exactly the same problem. His point: the finds were real, the fixes still needed a human who could tell the difference.

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

My Raspberry Pi the AI desk buddy never even got on Wi-Fi

The same builder tried the other half of Meta's kit, a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W that was meant to become a battery powered voice announcer. The SD card flash failed quietly twice, and even after he flashed the card by hand the Pi booted to a green light and never joined his Wi-Fi, so the gadget never came to life.

This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
WorkWent wrong

The AI looped on one prompt and burned $20 on my website

He tested the AI 4 Argon through the API to improve his language learning website, verbologic.com. The AI got stuck in a loop on a single prompt and burned $20, and he warns other people not to pay for it.

$20at stake
This one went wrong. See what happened 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.