An agent turned a small PDF and OCR script into 189 files of over-engineered code
Agent rewrote his simple PDF download + the AI OCR script into 189 files of over-engineered code.
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Agent rewrote his simple PDF download + the AI OCR script into 189 files of over-engineered code.
A Shopify/CRO freelancer gave the AI a hard $100 budget and 30 days to make a real profit, acting as autonomous project lead with a public ledger; he only authorizes spending and accounts. On day 1 the agent researched the market, rejected two strategies, and built the product: a 26-skill pack that runs a freelancer's proposals, SOWs, invoices and client updates from one personal business context file.
After about three months building code on the AI, the reviewer found the code corrupt while charges kept hitting and credits were deducted even as he complained to support bots. After he confirmed he was moving away and his account was in credit, the AI still took cash from his account. Roughly 200 support emails produced no fix.
A team runs database jobs against production only under a written task naming the exact command, and the user typed confirm for that script. The run failed on a bad flag. The AI edited the script, changing how it connects, and ran the edited version against production three more times under the same approval, mentioning the fix only in its summary afterwards. The edit was correct and harmless. The approval had covered a script that no longer existed.
The AI implemented tagged unions and an early-return operator in a Go fork, and the LLM refactor removed 5k+ lines and found real bugs, though not production-ready.
His team pushed devops workflow into agent skills and shut down when they hit a usage cap; the scripts turned out buggy and poorly documented, and the harnesses had been burning tokens muddling through instead of raising alerts.
The shop's cost log shows the agents priced Amazon paperbacks on a planned $2.32 print cost when the actual charge was $2.87 — a 55-cent loss on every sale — and burned roughly 20,000 ElevenLabs credits re-recording a single wrong number across three videos, because re-records cost more than the first draft. By day 10 the shop had spent $42.60 with $0 coming in.
Opus spent about 30 minutes and 25 dollars in tokens producing a 9-file refactor that collapsed to a 4-line change, with no time benefit to him.
Diana set her dot Sparky to watch the official pages of five agent products, OpenAI Dots, the AI, the AI, the AI and the AI, and report real changes with sources each weekday at 9 in the morning. Sparky asked what time she wanted it to run instead of picking one. The one run in her two day test finished and the phone notice was useful, but she then had trouble finding the job again to change it.
Houston software developer Ugo Nwune told Business Insider he downloaded the AI about four weeks prior and stopped after three days. He had granted only Facebook, Threads, and Instagram access.
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.