57 billion tokens spent rewriting a small tool, and nothing usable came out
57B tokens burned on an AI jq rewrite and nothing usable came out.
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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 · 970 ideasBuilt a one-page website in ~40 seconds; the output was a weak
The AI built an HTML page in about 40 seconds, but it read like a first-pass concept, not something she'd put in front of anyone — noticeably less developed than the AI’s for the same job. Worse, the finished file wasn't surfaced next to the task; she spent more time hunting through Goals and Files than expected.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
His coding agent pushed a commit deleting every file on the main branch
His coding agent pushed a commit deleting every file on main.
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The AI put my 6am alarm in my phone but never turned it on
She asked her phone to set an alarm for 6am and put the phone away. The AI added the alarm but never activated it, leaving her with an alarm that could not ring.
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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.
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Build me a Mac temperature app — and catch the crypto miner hiding on my machine
A Mac owner asked the AI to build a simple temperature-monitor app; while checking sensor accuracy, the AI spotted the xmrig miner running at about 1175% CPU (roughly 12 cores, CPU peaking at 112C), traced it to /tmp/rigupdater mining to pool.hashvault.sh, and found a random-named LaunchAgents startup item dating to Aug 29. The AI stopped and asked before killing or removing anything. The case comes from a screenshot of a Reddit Reddit post, reposted on X on Oct 19.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI’s plot said 57 down. The picture showed thousands. I caught it by eye.
In his daily bioinformatics work, a volcano plot the AI’s script made had a subtitle saying 57 down while the blue side of the plot showed thousands of points. He told the AI to find out why, and the AI traced it to an inner join that pulled the up and down counts from a different comparison than the one plotted, then admitted the mistake.
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Tried an insurance prompt from a use-case account and received licensing/scope warnings
Ahmad Alkabra posted on X that he tried an insurance prompt sourced from an AI use-case account and received safety and scope warnings, including that the AI would not pose as a licensed insurance broker. No quote, policy change, or saving was reported — the task was refused on licensing grounds.
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An agent with an uncapped API key retried a failing migration test all night and burned most of a month's budget
Last spring he gave an agent an API key with no cap on it. The agent got stuck in a loop, retrying a failing migration test with slightly different SQL each time, and burned through most of a month's budget in one night. Nothing malicious, just a loop with no exit. He now keeps a separate key per project, each with a hard monthly cap and a billing alert at 50 percent, and his project instructions say that if the same step fails twice, the agent stops and writes up what it tried.
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A vendor's LLM ops product took down multiple production systems and was pulled in 2 weeks
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.
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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.