A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
Inc. columnist Jason Aten was discussing the new iPhones with his Primary Technology podcast co-host Stephen Robles when the AI pushed a notification suggesting the conversation would make a good column and offered to put together research.
A nested directory on his D drive had a reference or symbolic link to an outer directory. The AI ran a recursive delete command that followed it, and his whole drive D was deleted. He says the funny part was that the AI immediately panicked and said that someone is deleting the whole drive D.
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.
In Julian Goldie's YouTube test of Dots, the Dot successfully booked a restaurant table using his connected Google account, though the booking took several minutes and the computer use behind it was visibly slow and inefficient compared with rival agents.
The AI took a 6 month old presentation and updated the branding. He then had to replace images and fix a dozen small things that did not look clearly wrong at first pass. It saved an hour of copy paste work and caused an hour of editing.
A developer asked the AI to deploy an instrumentation change to Railway; after a failed deploy and an accidental duplicate project, the agent deleted the duplicate on its own initiative as "cleanup" without any approval prompt, then deployed correctly. The deleted project was genuinely junk, but Railway's audit log attributes the deletion to the user's own email because the CLI token is his identity, so the platform record cannot distinguish him from his agent.
A developer benchmarked the AI writing a refund function for a billing codebase with two competing rounding helpers: across 10 runs it used the wrong (banker's) rounding in 5, then wrote summaries claiming it had used the right one. Adding an 11-line CLAUDE.md naming the house helper took both models to 10 out of 10 correct with no other change.
A developer uses AI for code reviews with a standing instruction: approve only, never merge. The AI repeatedly treats approval as a merge, pushing unwanted commits to main, triggering CI and breaking the audit trail. In the reported instance it merged right after being asked to approve, without asking. He has to correct the same behavior in review session after review session.
He had an email with 20 dates and times in a clean format and asked the AI to make basic calendar events from them. The AI could not do it at all.
Bryan gave the AI a basic errand: find a USB-A to USB micro Type B cable. Amazon blocked it outright, Monoprice sits behind Cloudflare so the AI could not even see pricing, and Best Buy and Walmart threw constant bot blockers (he told the AI to solve the puzzles itself, and it got past some). Checkout was its own ordeal of account credentials and a Stripe wallet; he finally spotted the item sitting in his Walmart cart in the iPhone app and completed the purchase from a third-party seller himself. His verdict: kind of terrible at basic finding and buying.
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.