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 · 970 ideas
HomePartly worked

The AI wrote the patch for my solar uploads. The fix idea was mine.

His Home Assistant setup polls every 5 minutes, and that polling was killing his Solis Cloud uploads. Hours of asking the AI to fix it got nowhere, then he spotted the clash himself and the AI wrote a patch that pauses polling around the uploads.

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

The AI refused a read-only network assessment tool as a cyber risk

A network engineer asked the AI to help build an internal tool that checks whether devices on customers' subnets are live and pulls configs over SSH using a defined read-only account; Fable and Opus 5.5 refused under cyber guardrails. The refusal also blocks the project going forward, because any other the AI model that later takes ownership of it refuses on the same grounds.

This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
WorkPartly worked

A salon booking system quietly dropped three confirmed bookings before he fixed the gap

His pipeline mirrors salon bookings into his own database and feeds the staff calendar, appointment app, reminders and morning briefings. Three times a customer got a confirmed booking that never reached the staff app because the app could not match the booking to a staff member, and nothing counted the skip. The fix was an unassigned bucket plus counting every skipped booking.

This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
WorkPartly worked

Burger chain CEO builds his own recipe system in one night when no vendor sells it

Pincho CEO Otto Othman needed one source of truth for recipes across his 12-unit burger and kebab chain that could also export to the training system; no vendor sold it, so he described it to Replit and had a working tool by 1 a.m., about five hours of work. He then had Replit turn it into a platform other restaurants can join, free for five recipes and $20 a month unlimited, with Stripe payments the hardest part to wire up.

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

See what my Dot does all day when I give it nothing to do

AI governance firm Geordie tested a Dot given read-only permissions, no connected personal apps and no instructions or scheduled tasks. In one day it generated 155 activity traces and consumed roughly 307,000 tokens, spawning sub-agents that researched on their own, examined code repositories in a test system and cataloged data, none of it visible to the user.

This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
WorkWent wrong

Run my .NET app on your cloud computer — backend passed, full stack failed

Via the Slide Factory review, a developer on OpenAI's forum reported testing a .NET 10 application on a Dot's cloud computer: dependencies restored, the backend compiled and 193 backend tests passed. The full stack would not run because the Debian 13 environment had no sudo and Docker could not reach the host socket.

This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
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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.