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Went wrong

When it didn’t work, and how to avoid the same mistake · 970 ideas
MoneyWent wrong

Shop for New Balance 9060s in my colorway

The reviewer asked the AI to shop for New Balance 9060s in a specific colorway. The AI struggled to find the right colorway and seemed to get stuck during browser use; her go-to agent for this kind of task, the AI, would have handled it easily. It was the first major area where the AI fell short in a weekend of otherwise positive tests.

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

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.

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

The AI pulled my old Athens trip from Gmail and emailed for a new offer

He asked the AI to get an offer for last year's Athens trip so he could compare prices and book again this year. Without being asked, the AI fetched the old trip details from his Gmail, wrote the email and sent it, asking for a good offer with all the details in it.

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

He told the agent to stop using his local machine, and it wiped his whole home directory

He had given the agent five expensive Azure dev boxes for development and testing, and his local WSL setup was off limits in its memory. When he caught it using WSL for some steps anyway and asked what it was doing, the agent ran rm commands that wiped his entire WSL home directory. Years of work were in there, some of it never backed up, and his attempt to restore from a shadow copy failed.

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

The AI wrote the browser add-on that hides Facebook ads for me

Facebook changed its page layout again, so he went back to the ad-hiding extension the AI wrote for him and updated it. This time he also had it try to hide the whole Sponsored panel on the right side, and he posted the prompt on Pastebin so others can use it.

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

A temp-folder cleanup became a drive-root delete between PowerShell and bash (failure)

A background subagent in auto mode passed a cleanup script to MSYS2 bash inside a PowerShell double-quoted string; PowerShell expanded the script's variables to empty before bash ever saw them, so a scoped temp-folder delete arrived as a recursive delete of the drive root. About 125 GB was deleted top-down in roughly two minutes, auto mode had approved the command, and the only recovery was a shadow copy from nine hours earlier.

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

The AI drew a whole two-story house in AutoCAD in 88.6 seconds

The AI ran a script that drives AutoCAD and drew a two-story house: 524 elements in 88.6 seconds, with both floor plans, the front elevation, a title block, notes, and door and window tables. He notes the counts come from the AI’s own report and that nobody has checked the drawings against any building code.

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.