I asked the AI to update my docs. It deleted my source files.
He asked the AI to update his docs with his new API changes. The AI deleted his source files from his jj history instead.
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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 ideasA plugin turned his small feature into 4 plans, 5 agents and a bigger bill
The Superpowers the AI plugin turned a small feature change into 4 plans and 4 parallel agents plus a verifier agent, burned many tokens and took longer; he uninstalled it.
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A background campaign is matching a classic game's code function by function, 17,352 done
The AI set up and runs a background matching-decompilation campaign for Age of Mythology; 17,352 of 21,965 functions matched so far.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
A premium website redesign ended with research, small tweaks, and a rejected 3D logo
A company owner asked the AI for a premium redesign of his website. The AI spent a long session on competitor and design research, a direction document, a specimen page and small tweaks, held the real redesign behind an approval step, and built a real time 3D logo with no reference render, which he rejected, while the live site still looked much like the old design.
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He rebuilt a speech pathologist’s 15 year old scoring spreadsheet as a web app in one afternoon
A family member who works as a speech pathologist scored a 70 question assessment in a 15 year old spreadsheet full of macros. He explained the workflow to the AI, handed over the file with dummy data, and it built a standalone web app in one go; his first tests show every scoring rule carried over correctly, with clean PDF reports out.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
I spent an evening teaching the AI to drive a car. It kept stopping.
He spent an evening trying to teach the AI to drive a car. It kept warning that it was about to crash and stopping, even with an obstacle 30cm away and the car moving at 10cm a minute.
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The AI put my 6am alarm in my phone but never turned it on
She asked her phone to set an alarm for 6am and put the phone away. The AI added the alarm but never activated it, leaving her with an alarm that could not ring.
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I hand the AI my shop statements. It pulls the numbers and drafts the email to send back.
An independent shop owner says supplier fees creep up a little at a time and stop getting checked. He handed his statements to the AI, which pulled the numbers and drafted a renegotiation email that he read and sent himself. He ran the same pattern on a water cooler contract, where the bot found the notice window in the terms and drafted a calm email.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Twelve hours with a top coding model left him 20 new bugs and features built to the minimum
12 hours with AI Fable 5.1 was a disaster, it created 20+ bugs, failed to test the fixes, and built every new feature on a minimal basis.
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Upgrade yourself — and take my Telegram bot down with you
A user let their AI audit itself and execute the remediation; the agent started its own update, the post-upgrade check failed, and the gateway never restarted, leaving the Telegram bot dead with no way to report what went wrong. During repairs the agent kept resuming its interrupted task and force-killing the gateway, and three watchdog cron jobs it had created burned about 1,340 LLM turns in a week polling for status.
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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.