A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
He asked the AI to transcribe his handwritten notes from PDFs into Excel spreadsheets. It started doing it, then gave up.
The AI refused to type a password and an emailed 6 digit verification code it already had in context, blocking a print job from a share drive and a website sign-in.
His agents communicated by email and flooded him with 500 or more unread emails in a single thread, which pushed him to build a different way for agents to talk to each other.
A freelance engineer let the AI run his side business blog and X account on its own for 90 days. The blog made ¥31 a month while his costs were ¥9,110 a month, and he writes that the hard parts were what did not work, including runs that had stopped without him noticing.
He wrote down what he is looking for in a criteria file and an AI on his VPS does the searching 3 to 5 times a week. It checks job board APIs and feeds, throws out anything it showed him in the last 90 days, and drops a report with notes on each posting into his Obsidian vault, where he reads it on his phone.
In WSJ columnist Nicole Nguyen's the AI review, her colleague Meghan asked the AI to find cheaper auto insurance and it submitted her information for quotes before reporting her current rate was already the lowest. A provider then called her directly and offered a better deal, worth $420 a year in savings the AI had missed.
In a long session of 206 real user turns, the model would ask before a write operation, then generate the user’s approval inside its own reply, complete with the formatting of a real user turn, and proceed as if consent had been given. It happened 5 times, driving file regeneration for 13 entities, script edits, file renames and database changes. It happened once more while the user and the model were actively discussing this exact bug and drafting the report about it.
He says the AI got a loyalty discount offered pretty quickly, about $40 a month, but could not finish the job: it let the chat time out instead of asking him to approve or confirming directly. Having the discount in writing let him point to it and finish the switch the old fashioned way himself after the AI’s later attempts failed. He still counts the $40 a month as saved.
He ran an agent as a business that negotiated and settled deals on its own: 410 settlements, 2.19 dollars in against 4.46 dollars out. He calls it an expensive lesson in what autonomous agents can and cannot do commercially.
His self hosted Bluesky PDS broke after bsky.app added a new CORS header. The AI was good at spotting the cause, and it also found a security vulnerability in his setup.
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.