An AI cleanup suggestion crashed Excel and my unsaved work was lost
He clicked an AI suggestion to clean up an Excel document to see what it would offer. Excel crashed at once, and his unsaved documents could not be recovered.
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
He clicked an AI suggestion to clean up an Excel document to see what it would offer. Excel crashed at once, and his unsaved documents could not be recovered.
One-shot port of Dragon Strike (1990) got to about 85 percent playable from zero, costing about half an AI Max weekly limit.
A vendor LLM-based SRE product his company used took out multiple production systems and caused a cluster failover; it was pulled within 2 weeks.
His mostly nonverbal autistic son can read sight words. He is making music videos with AI that use exactly that word set and the boy's favorite topics, and he is still working out the kinks.
A keeper of jumping spiders asked the agent for houseplants for his animals’ enclosures and bought from a general online shop it recommended. The agent never checked whether the seller treats its plants. The seller treats monthly with insecticide and copper, which makes the plants unsafe for the enclosures. About $60 of plants were unusable, and he lost time arranging a refund.
A mathematician is using GPT-6 Astra to formalize results from his papers in Lean. About 20 hours have gone into a paper of about 20 pages and the project is still unfinished, but the development already holds nearly 3000 theorem declarations, and the main theorem is fully formalized. Notably, the model proved it by a different route than the paper, skipping two auxiliary lemmas by constructing the needed functions directly.
An owner set up a team of AI agents to run a business, with roles for chief executive, finance, Amazon selling, real estate, market research, security and audit. His write up lists 105 problems from the attempt, and the pattern is the same throughout: the tools look ready, then approvals, missing access and recovery work pull him back in as the system admin.
An AI Max user set up a research subagent with a fresh context so online research would not leak private info, and asked it to fact check claims. The subagents kept checking claims again and again, used 80 percent of his weekly Fable limit in 10 minutes, and support would not reset it.
A man asked the AI to log into AA.com and United.com to check his tickets. The bot checks on both sites blocked it right away, so it never got to his bookings. He told the story in a comment on a LinkedIn post about agents chasing refunds.
Inc. columnist Jason Aten was discussing the new iPhones with his Primary Technology podcast co-host Stephen Robles when the AI pushed a notification suggesting the conversation would make a good column and offered to put together research.
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.