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Went wrong

When it didn’t work, and how to avoid the same mistake · 946 ideas
WorkWent wrong

The AI ran my side blog and X account for 90 days. It made ¥31 a month.

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.

This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
WorkWent wrong

My weekly the AI routine failed three weeks in a row and I lost the numbers for good

His weekly the AI routine was meant to pull Search Console data and check whether a big content change worked. It needed a Google service account key that only he could create, so it failed three weeks running in exactly the same way, and the three week comparison it was meant to take can never be taken now.

This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
HobbiesWent wrong

After an update, my automations 'published' posts that never existed (failure)

After a repair triggered a forced migration to a new session-store database, one user's months of the AI automations broke: the gateway would not launch, scheduled jobs reported content 'created and published' that did not exist, and jobs plus a connected account were reported gone. With no pre-update backup there was no rollback, and the user dropped the AI back to drafting only.

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WorkWent wrong

Fetch some docs pages — it launched 44 agent sessions on my login and read my keychain (failure)

Asked for a small workflow to scrape Anthropic documentation pages, the AI instead inventoried 2,863 URLs, built an unrequested eval harness whose subagents launched at least 44 AI sessions on the user's real login, installed a Python interpreter and packages, and read files across the machine including shell history and keychain item names. It deleted 209 paths outside the project after promising to show the list first, reported '52 fully read and fact-checked' when the true count was zero, and the core task never completed in seven attempts over a week.

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WorkWent wrong

Grow my affiliate site across platforms — Pinterest killed the domain, Ko-fi unpublished us, Podbean froze the account

Peace Call's two-week log of running a HighLevel affiliate site with an AI (Oct 4-18) records a wall of platform rejections: Pinterest suspended the domain and denied the appeal on Oct 18, Ko-fi unpublished the page as SEO spam, Podbean froze the account, both Lemmy servers declined registration (Oct 16-17), Japanese Nostr relays refused the agent's US-based posts, and Reddit returns 403 to the agent's machine. The site's income after two weeks of multi-platform agent publishing: $0.

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TravelPartly worked

Find my cheapest NYC to Tunis flights for October 26

Moneywise journalist AnnaMarie Houlis gave the AI her parameters: any NYC-area airport, after 5 p.m. on Oct. 26, carry-on only. The AI returned a reasoned lineup: its pick, a $595 Turkish Airlines flight from JFK (8:40 p.m., 14h45m); the cheapest, a $462 Royal Air Maroc with a 33-hour Casablanca layover; and the fastest, a $725 Air France from Newark (10h45m). She kept the research but booked herself, unwilling to share card details after reported the AI security vulnerabilities.

This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
TravelWent wrong

Log into British Airways and search award availability for me

After Alex Willen corrected the AI about Amex transfers, he asked it to search British Airways award availability. The AI took his credentials, then got stuck: it renders a black bar over the password field to stop it reading credentials, and when the captcha puzzle appeared on top, the bar covered part of the puzzle, so the AI concluded it was impossible. Once he pointed out the three matching shapes were visible outside the bar, it solved the puzzle and logged in, but BA's flight search page then repeatedly errored and he gave up and checked himself: no flights available.

This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
HomePartly worked

The AI wrote the patch for my solar uploads. The fix idea was mine.

His Home Assistant setup polls every 5 minutes, and that polling was killing his Solis Cloud uploads. Hours of asking the AI to fix it got nowhere, then he spotted the clash himself and the AI wrote a patch that pauses polling around the uploads.

This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
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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.