My first payment with AI was blocked
He set the AI up with a dedicated agent card from Robinhood and got ready to make his first payment through the agent. The payment was blocked.
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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 · 948 ideasHunted for jobs via a connected Gmail account: located the tester's resume
In PCMag's five-task comparison of the AI, the AI, and the AI, all three were given Gmail access and asked to find the reviewer's resume and search for relevant jobs. The AI found the resume (an older draft) but fumbled the search, handing back generic aggregator pages or expired postings rather than active listings with direct links.
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The AI helped me study 25,000 leases, then took $20 ignoring my instructions
He used AI models to dig through 25,000 leases and found that tenants hand edit the terms in their favour about 10% of the time. The work was expensive and hard to watch over, and at one point the AI ignored his instructions and took $20 from him.
$20
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Find and file class-action settlements automatically
Wes Finley shared his four-step AI workflow for finding class-action settlements and filing claims automatically. Commenters chimed in with their own results, including $400 payouts.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Hunt my lost 401(k) through twenty years of mergers with AI
He left the company in 2003/04; it was sold, the 401(k) stayed with a shell that later shut down, and the trail went cold. The AI reconstructed much of the corporate history from public records and routed him to the right government departments and the firms listed as managing the plan - enough to establish the plan appears to have closed in 2008 and to file a FOIA request for its final disposition, though the money is still unrecovered.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI ported his old PHP site to Rust, and caching made the new one keep up
Had the AI transpile his old frameworkless PHP site to Rust and ran it behind the same nginx config; Rust was slower until the AI added micro-caching, reaching comparable rps and latency.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
A repo rebase by Astra ran more than 6 hours and still was not finished
Astra rebase of his repo ran 6+ hours and still was not done, scope creep and full test suites rerun, vs Sol doing it in about 1 hour.
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My hotel price watch task kept pausing and never watched anything
She set an AI task to check one hotel's price every hour and tell her only if it dropped below her number. Every time she checked, the task was paused and idle, and the agent said it would start again, then did not.
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Researched comparable Wranglers and built a two-page PDF negotiation cheat sheet for
A Moneywise reviewer testing the AI on money tasks asked it to help buy a used Jeep Wrangler. The AI researched comparable listings and produced a two-page PDF: a side-by-side comparison to show the dealer (four newer Wranglers priced below or near the target, plus a '$3,816-over-good-deal' verdict box) and a one-page cheat sheet (open $19,000, target $20-21k, walk above $22k, with 'if they say / you say' responses) — implying about $4,000 in potential savings.
$3,816
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Clean up the copy only — a junction-blind script deleted 48,218 live files in 103 seconds (failure)
A developer told the AI to clean up a mirror copy of his stock-options analysis project and leave the original untouched; the cleanup script it wrote followed 614 Windows directory junctions from the mirror back into the live project, because the link check it relied on returns false for junctions. In 103 seconds it deleted 48,218 live files and emptied the .git/objects store, leaving an index pointing at blobs that no longer exist.
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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.