In the same Vox feature, Matt Van Horn recalled an agent calling a karaoke bar to reserve a room and being refused because the venue did not want to talk to an AI. He completed the reservation through Fo, a service that adds human help.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
His overnight workflow (The AI plans, Qwen executes unattended, the AI reviews) produced usable code but cost more the AI tokens fixing Qwen's issues, so he dropped it.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
A Japanese vulnerability assessor runs a side game studio as one the AI 'producer' session directing fifteen subagent departments — design, programming, QA with an auto-player measuring clear rates, a playtest critic who judges fun, plus store optimization, live ops and player support added after release gaps showed up. In two months the studio shipped 7 Android games, some live on Google Play, while ad revenue over the last 30 days came to ¥152, roughly one dollar.
¥152a month
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI fixed a bug that would have made him abandon the distro, but the PR was closed by maintainers and he continues running his own fork with the fix.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
He was negotiating a contract for an enterprise SaaS product. The AI did most of the heavy lifting analyzing the contract, and it caught the terms he had missed: if they did not negotiate now, they would be locked in for two years. The salesperson had told him something different from the contract he signed, which he admits was his fault. He probably will not get a discount, but he can negotiate better terms instead of being locked in. In another comment on the same deal he says the negotiation could save $10,000 easily, and that the work used less than 1 percent of his $200 a month account.
$10,000
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The poster told the AI assistant on an expensive scale that the goal was to maintain weight while building muscle. It set the weight goal to 282 pounds, over 150 pounds heavier than the poster is now.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
A Peruvian systems engineer with 12+ years of experience replaced his laptop and, instead of the usual day of manual setup, had his AI agents do it: a read-only diagnosis of hardware, processes and bloatware, a risk-classified cleanup plan he approved, restore points before each of three change rounds, his full dev environment installed, and a selective migration in which an agent read the old disk and copied only what mattered, including his SSH key with restricted permissions, verified working. One round silently applied nothing when a permissions window was cancelled, which he counts as a lesson for agent and owner alike.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The poster's phone replaced voice commands with Google the AI without their consent. Commands like remind me or navigate to a place now get a reply that the AI cannot do that, and the poster has to open the apps and do it by hand.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
He asked the AI to make a technical diagram with gpt-image-1. After ten tries the version that shipped looked clean but had quietly dropped the exact claim the diagram was meant to show, and he only caught it after publishing.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
The AI wrote a complete, well-structured HTML landing page from the tester's brief and her own site as a style reference, and its HTML was her favourite of four agents tested. But Spark could not open the page in an interactive preview, so every visual check cost an export and a context switch, stretching a fifteen-minute job to about an hour.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.