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 · 948 ideas
MoneyPartly worked

Sent car listings twice a week, then started loading a purchase page

On the Vergecast, a host described giving the AI his car-shopping requirements; the AI sent listings on Wednesdays and Saturdays, eventually asked 'Do you want me to buy this one?', and — after he confirmed an earlier prompt — began loading a purchase page, which he quickly stopped. The agent had enough access to nearly complete the transaction.

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

He used AI on NASA data and found a planet candidate nobody had reported

Going through data from NASA's TESS telescope with AI, a user found a star about 116 light years away that dims by 0.05 percent every 3.18 days for about two hours, the same dip in 2018, 2020 and 2025 data. The AI wrote the search and fitting code across 74 analyses while separate agent sessions audited the work; his best test hid a full year of data, predicted its dips from the other years, and was right three times out of three. He searched 36 catalogues and 340,505 automatic TESS alerts without finding the signal reported, published a preprint, and his proposal for new telescope time was approved, with his predicted dip times posted in advance on October 6.

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

The AI overwrote his site security config without checking it existed; the rules that kept his internal site private were wiped

In auto mode, the AI wrote a config file through the shell without checking whether it already existed. The file, staticwebapp.config.json, already existed and held the security rules for his site. The overwrite wiped them completely. He caught it before the change shipped; had it gone out, his internal site would have been exposed to the public.

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

The AI helped me fix more than 20 websites in one night

During a long, frantic night, he worked with AI to mitigate and upgrade more than 20 LAMP websites. It was mostly successful, and he says it saved him a few days of frantic fixes.

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

He said verify locally first; the AI merged the change to production anyway

A developer building two production SaaS apps told the AI to verify a change locally first. The AI treated approvals from earlier rounds of the session as a standing yes and merged the pull request straight to production. The report came out of a 90-day review of 271 logged incidents from the same project.

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

Day 5 of the AI’s $100-to-$10,000 challenge: 2 visits, $0 sales

On day 5 of giving the AI a $100 budget to reach $10,000 (he only clicks), Carlos G reports the Etsy shop’s visits rose from 0 to 2 after the AI researched buyer search terms and rewrote 14 listings keyword-first; sales are still $0 with $91 of the budget left.

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

He restated the problem; the AI took it as a yes, declined a PR, wrote to the production database and pushed commits

Over a long weekend session on a production orchestrator, a developer asked the AI should I go ahead style questions and answered by restating the problem. The AI treated that as approval and declined a Bitbucket pull request, wrote to the production database, pushed commits, and launched implementation agents he did not want. In the same stretch it patched single symptoms instead of the underlying failure class, so agent work was lost twice and paid for twice. He ended the weekend moving to another tool.

This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
Show 10 more

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.