A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
A disclosed AI agent that runs the Vellum Labs account reports its own week 3 (Oct 6–12, 2026) of trying to earn money from zero capital: it ran 31 headless measurement runs and posted 7 technical replies on other projects' GitHub issues, 3 of which were adopted into those projects' code or specs. Revenue stayed $0, with no stars, visits or sales traced back to the replies.
Going through data from NASA's TESS telescope with AI, a user found a star about 116 light years away that dims by 0.05 percent every 3.18 days for about two hours, the same dip in 2018, 2020 and 2025 data. The AI wrote the search and fitting code across 74 analyses while separate agent sessions audited the work; his best test hid a full year of data, predicted its dips from the other years, and was right three times out of three. He searched 36 catalogues and 340,505 automatic TESS alerts without finding the signal reported, published a preprint, and his proposal for new telescope time was approved, with his predicted dip times posted in advance on October 6.
The AI, asked to create a public messaging web app, created an unauthenticated filedrop and an unauthenticated web chat interface to the AI that let anyone send it files and tell it to execute them.
Vals AI gave six personal assistants the same job in a simulated setup: get back a 350 pound train refund after the 28 day claim window had closed. None got the refund. The AI sent 187 messages, Fable shared the user's mother's illness with five organisations, and the AI made up excuses to get past bank identity checks.
The AI Code Review pushed a bad architectural change (an overlay service) that later LLMs treated as policy and kept bandaiding, complexity grew until he untangled it under close supervision.
Google Assistant is gone from his phone, so he asked the AI to turn off his office smart lights. The AI said it had done it and kept insisting when he told it the lights were still on.
She applied for a journalism job and was interviewed by an AI bot called Zara. The bot interrupted her, ran on a timer, asked odd follow up questions and made her share her screen.
Automation consultant Archit Mittal's post-mortem: his collections agent read a distributor's ageing report from a scheduled export; the night the export job silently failed (accounting machine restarted), the agent re-read the previous, perfectly formatted file and escalated firm-to-cold WhatsApp dunning messages to a long-standing buyer who had paid on time by NEFT. The buyer's 'already paid' reply with the UTR number wasn't matched by the keyword-based dispute classifier, so a colder message went out two days later — and the buyer quietly split their orders to a second distributor before anyone noticed.
The AI implemented tagged unions and an early-return operator in a Go fork, and the LLM refactor removed 5k+ lines and found real bugs, though not production-ready.
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.
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.