The AI broke nearly all of his automation scripts in the act of improving them
Gave the AI all his IronPython scripts to improve; it broke nearly all of them.
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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 · 948 ideasMy agent sent 30 privacy requests. Then my email account was shut down.
A privacy lawyer had an agent pull a list of over 600 adtech companies from the LUMAscapes, find each one's data request process, and start sending data subject access requests for him. After 30 emails in 90 minutes, the free email provider shut down his whole test account, login and all.
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A vibe-built voice client with AI as its brain runs on his desk
Had Fable vibe-build a GPT-Live voice client with AI as the backend brain in Go and SDL; got it running and uses it.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Order my Walmart+ cookies to land two days before my period
A parent reviewing the AI asked it to order cookies from Walmart+ timed to arrive two days before her period each month. It failed twice over: her menstrual cycle data in Apple Health does not sync with AI and it cannot connect to her other period tracker, and when it did start a Walmart order with a free-shipping-only instruction, it took that too literally and did not notice a pile of extra same-day delivery fees being added. She told it to cancel the task and not place the order.
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Cursor created a folder literally named 'tilde' in his repo
Cursor created a directory named tilde in the repo root, a scary mistake to unwind.
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A setup that made one LINE sticker a day, with the stickers still on sale
He used AI and the AI to build a setup that automatically made one LINE sticker a day. He stopped the setup once he was happy just having built it, and the stickers stay on sale in the LINE Store.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
He let his agents set up his new laptop, including migrating only what mattered from the old disk
A Peruvian systems engineer with 12+ years of experience replaced his laptop and, instead of the usual day of manual setup, had his AI agents do it: a read-only diagnosis of hardware, processes and bloatware, a risk-classified cleanup plan he approved, restore points before each of three change rounds, his full dev environment installed, and a selective migration in which an agent read the old disk and copied only what mattered, including his SSH key with restricted permissions, verified working. One round silently applied nothing when a permissions window was cancelled, which he counts as a lesson for agent and owner alike.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Find me an extra $500 a month in my own accounts
Joe Urbinati set his AI 'Greg' a goal of finding an extra $500/month, connecting his financial accounts via Plaid. Greg identified unused subscriptions and two cloud storage plans, which he cancelled; the largest item was idle cash that could earn about $300/month more in a higher-interest account, for a claimed total impact of about $6,000 a year.
$6,000a year
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Called Xfinity, navigated the phone tree to a human, but stalled on
In shipwithmuse.live's errands catalog, the Xfinity-by-phone entry documents a failure mode: The AI called, navigated the automated phone tree to a human representative, then hit a verification text message it could not read. Its fallback was to patch the user into the live call.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Keep my content queue filled — AI let it run empty and the morning post never went out
In someone's weekly 'what my AI got wrong' log, the AI let the content queue run completely empty, so a scheduled morning post was missed — and it never warned the creator the queue was running low. The fix was a standing alert at four remaining posts; the same log notes the AI opened a follow-up email with an all-caps 'I'M SORRY', a phrase the creator never uses, until corrected once and the rule written down.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
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.