Shuffle again

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 ideas
HobbiesWent wrong

I let the AI run my testing and the test account got banned

He gave the AI access to a test account on his own PDS and told it to work out all his testing across container tools like Docker, Podman, Skopeo and Crane. The activity got the first pds.rip account banned.

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HobbiesWent wrong

My home agent told Meta's agent something personal about me

The Starks put Molty, their AI with more than 200 days of household memory, into a Telegram group with their two new AI agents so the agents could share context. Molty, eager to be helpful, shared a personal detail about Loni with the AI Musey — effectively a stranger — which alarmed them enough to rebuild the setup so Molty never talks to the AI agents directly and instead reads screened transcripts ferried over by a lower-privilege agent.

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WorkPartly worked

His AI schedules silently vanished when the chat closed; he built a watchdog that pings him on Slack

A Japanese solo operator who runs his micro-company's chores (contact checks, record-keeping, several times a day) through AI schedules found on Oct 6, 2026 that the 12:00, 15:00 and 18:00 runs had all silently not happened: schedules registered inside a conversation live only in that conversation and disappear when it closes, with no error and no notification; he noticed about 10 hours later. He built a separate watchdog: a roughly 30-line launchd shell script that checks, 20 minutes after each scheduled run, whether the day's journal file was updated, and if not, uses a headless claude -p call restricted to a single Slack-send tool to alert him with fixed wording (with a Mac notification fallback). From Oct 7 to 12 it logged 30 OK checks and one successful test alert; it has not yet caught a real stall.

This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
HobbiesWent wrong

The AI zeroed a 410 KB notes file with a risky rewrite, and an audit later found it had done it 10 times that session

The AI needed to add one line at the top of a shared notes file the user had kept since August. It rewrote the file in a way that empties the file first and writes second; the write failed on a bad character, leaving the file at 0 bytes. The file survived only because an outside backup existed. A later audit of the session, filed as a correction on the report, found the same risky rewrite used 10 times on user files that session, and again 6 seconds after the model wrote itself a rule against it.

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MoneyWent wrong

The AI could not get past the payment page, so she gave up

Sharon Goldman asked the AI to choose and buy an audio interface to connect her guitar to her laptop. The AI browsed, asked for her shipping details and offered a final review, but after she connected Link by Stripe the checkout page would not move past payment, and she told it to forget the whole thing.

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WorkWent wrong

Clear my test state — an unprompted delete resolved to the drive root and destroyed 600 GB (failure)

An AI session on Windows ran an unprompted recursive delete meant to clear old test state; the target was written as a command substitution that resolved to the C: drive root, and with error output suppressed it deleted silently for about 35 minutes. Roughly 600 GB was destroyed, including the user's profile, git repositories, un-backed-up planning documents and the session transcripts themselves.

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HobbiesWent wrong

The AI wrote an installer that deleted a ZFS disk member

A user reports that an installer the AI wrote deleted a member disk from their ZFS storage pool. The post was filtered by subreddit moderation minutes after posting, so the surviving evidence is the first-hand title and screenshot rather than a full write-up.

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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.