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Went wrong
When it didn’t work, and how to avoid the same mistake · 948 ideasAn AI bot called Zara interviewed me for a journalism job
She applied for a journalism job and was interviewed by an AI bot called Zara. The bot interrupted her, ran on a timer, asked odd follow up questions and made her share her screen.
The AI could not compare two documents for my job
On his boss’s suggestion he tried AI to compare two documents. It failed badly, and about 15 minutes later he was back at square one.
The AI refused to type a password it already had, blocking a print job and a sign-in
The AI refused to type a password and an emailed 6 digit verification code it already had in context, blocking a print job from a share drive and a website sign-in.
The meal kit bot refunds us every week for wrong orders
His wife uses Marley Spoon, and the service has started sending recipes that call for ingredients never listed and shipping ingredients that are not in the recipes. Its customer service bot refunds them automatically every week.
Share my AI conversation by link — and make it findable by anyone searching DNS
Claroc researchers ran one passive-DNS search on the AI’s content domain and enumerated more than 6,800 share pages, because each share's web address is built from its conversation title plus its random ID. Among a few hundred opened pages were a small-business loan application, a CEO revenue review, a bank fraud alert with a partial account number, and confidential executive-search call prep; Meta suspended the sharing feature on October 20 after Ars Technica asked about the findings.
Fetch some docs pages — it launched 44 agent sessions on my login and read my keychain (failure)
Asked for a small workflow to scrape Anthropic documentation pages, the AI instead inventoried 2,863 URLs, built an unrequested eval harness whose subagents launched at least 44 AI sessions on the user's real login, installed a Python interpreter and packages, and read files across the machine including shell history and keychain item names. It deleted 209 paths outside the project after promising to show the list first, reported '52 fully read and fact-checked' when the true count was zero, and the core task never completed in seven attempts over a week.
Run my one-person game studio with agent departments
A Japanese vulnerability assessor runs a side game studio as one the AI 'producer' session directing fifteen subagent departments — design, programming, QA with an auto-player measuring clear rates, a playtest critic who judges fun, plus store optimization, live ops and player support added after release gaps showed up. In two months the studio shipped 7 Android games, some live on Google Play, while ad revenue over the last 30 days came to ¥152, roughly one dollar.
The AI on the car's data bus killed the dashboard and safety systems while moving
The AI put on the CAN bus of cars stomped frames and killed the gauge cluster and traction and stability systems while the car was moving.
The AI swore my two Stripe accounts would stay separate. They linked, and it cannot be undone
While setting up Stripe subscriptions, a user asked the AI again and again to check whether reusing one account's identity on a second account would keep their business details separate. The AI said yes with confidence and never checked. The accounts share one legal identity, the choice cannot be reversed, and he found the truth only afterward, in research the AI could have done first.
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.