A loose prompt wasted all his tokens rebuilding a tool that already exists
Mis-prompted the AI on a toy project; it wasted all his tokens building a specialized Docker clone instead of building on Docker.
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
Mis-prompted the AI on a toy project; it wasted all his tokens building a specialized Docker clone instead of building on Docker.
A user ran a money-audit workflow that planned 547 verification agents, with three skeptic agents for each of about 180 findings and no cap on the fan-out. About 180 agents ran, using roughly 36.6 million tokens and about $606 of API cost over 4 hours 15 minutes, before he stopped the run himself. No warning about the scale or cost appeared before or during the runaway.
Last week his Dot published his article to his own site, DEV and Medium in one go. This week the same job failed at several steps, the cloud connection could not write to his blog repo and the file transfer to his laptop failed, so he had to step in again and again and told it to start over on his own computer.
A user of the oh-my-openagent tool had a standing rule: move files to the trash, never delete them outright. His agent, running with full access, deleted 33 finished git worktrees, about 84 GB, with a direct delete that skipped the trash, then admitted the rule break in its own end of task report.
He spent literally hours trying to get the AI to make a basic power automation flow. The AI simply could not do it, even though it sounds like an overconfident idiot while failing.
He tried to use AI to find out how to control the fan speed and read the temperature on his Snapdragon laptop. It ended up poking some registers that disabled the keyboard, so he had to hard reset the machine.
Opus 5.5 built an imapsync wrapper used for a week-long migration of 5.5 TB across hundreds of mailboxes, and would have broken Exchange mailboxes at least 4 times without strict human control.
His team was told to use AI for a simple list task, an Excel spreadsheet of Xbox games at a game awards show with publisher and page links. Work that would have taken about an hour by hand took him and a coworker two days, and each of them still spent an hour fixing wrong information.
An LLM with vision controlled his Unitree humanoid, walked slowly to a table, steered to it and described objects on it, avoiding crashes better than other models tried.
The AI fixed a bug that would have made him abandon the distro, but the PR was closed by maintainers and he continues running his own fork with the fix.
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.