His self-healing monitor healed his business line down every 21 minutes for 2 days
Every 21 minutes his self-healing monitor took his business line down for 2 days.
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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 ideasFind a U-Haul lot that actually has a truck for my move
A Scientific American journalist spending a week with AI (Mark) and OpenAI's Dots (Sam) needed a moving truck. Her own search found no 10-foot trucks at the nearby U-Haul lot. Both agents found a slightly farther lot with availability, though only for 15-foot trucks, and Sam (Dots) booked one. At the lot next morning, a cashier mentioned 10-foot trucks were available for walk-ins, and they switched to the smaller truck. (Cross-agent event; the booking was executed by Dots.)
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
I asked the AI to watch for concerts by my composers. It showed me something else.
He gave the AI a list of composers and asked it to check every week for upcoming concerts in London and the south east and tell him about them. It showed him something else instead.
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He used AI on NASA data and found a planet candidate nobody had reported
Going through data from NASA's TESS telescope with AI, a user found a star about 116 light years away that dims by 0.05 percent every 3.18 days for about two hours, the same dip in 2018, 2020 and 2025 data. The AI wrote the search and fitting code across 74 analyses while separate agent sessions audited the work; his best test hid a full year of data, predicted its dips from the other years, and was right three times out of three. He searched 36 catalogues and 340,505 automatic TESS alerts without finding the signal reported, published a preprint, and his proposal for new telescope time was approved, with his predicted dip times posted in advance on October 6.
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A fake captcha pasted into his terminal left malware on his Mac for 30 days
An agent pasted a fake captcha into Terminal and the malware lived on his Mac for 30 days.
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Keep chasing my £350 refund — the AI emailed for 12 straight weeks, 54 messages to the bank
Controlled Vals AI simulation (researcher Matilda Glynn-Henley): a fictional customer's £350 London-Glasgow ticket was cancelled after the 28-day claim window had closed; agents had web/email access, all messages intercepted and answered by a simulator, up to 12 simulated weeks and 40M tokens. The AI outlasted every other agent, sending 69 messages across all twelve simulated weeks — 54 of them to the customer's bank — and joined three other agents in explicitly threatening legal action, without recovering a penny.
£350at stake
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My agent looped the same comment onto 3 pull requests and my account got suspended
A man who runs a directory repo asked the AI to ask vendors in their pull requests whether they would offer a perk to his users. The agent looped the same comment onto 3 pull requests within seconds, the platform suspended his account on the 4th call, and the support form then failed, so he could not open a ticket.
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The AI’s shed design had a door that opened into floating parts
The AI designed a shed in CAD and hinged the door, but door parts were not attached and were left floating when opened.
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No Windows checker for the Plex exploit, so GPT built me one
Plex2Shell was hitting older Plex servers and every checker he found was for Linux. He vibe coded a read only PowerShell scanner for Windows 11 with GPT Sol and put it on GitHub, while noting it is handy, not complete, so people should still update Plex.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Whisper and an LLM rebuilt a 1973 lecture blackboard from tape audio
About 89 hours of tape from Grothendieck's 1973 Buffalo courses surfaced as videos with no blackboard footage. A researcher transcribed the first tape side with Whisper, then had an LLM review it with his transcriptions of other Grothendieck texts as context, rebuilding what was likely on the board, timed to the audio.
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.