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Went wrong

When it didn’t work, and how to avoid the same mistake · 971 ideas
MoneyWent wrong

Set up a daily Amazon price watch for a 400W solar panel

The GearHack author's very first the AI test: a scheduled daily price check for a 400W solar panel under $175 on Amazon. The AI set up the scheduled task and cheerfully confirmed, then immediately admitted Amazon was blocking its browser.

$175at stake
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
TravelPartly worked

Assist my 14-day Europe trip live — fixes, bookings and a few mistakes

Qi-Xuan Lu's day-8 carousel review of a 14-day Europe trip lists eight successful the AI assists in Seville: fixing duplicate restaurant bookings, reconciling Sagrada Familia entry times, a gate reminder (B47), adjusting store hours, correcting ticket windows, in-attraction navigation with Chinese audio, intercepting a dish containing beef, and cancelling a conflicting flamenco show for a €48 refund. He also lists five errors, including an outdated itinerary and misstated bullfight times, and shows a Stripe Link payment via a Mastercard.

€48
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
WorkWent wrong

He bought $200 of extra credits to finish a job; a fan-out workflow drained them while most of its agents never ran

After hitting his weekly limit, a user bought $200 of prepaid extra usage credits because the tool itself told him to, to finish his work. The limit message kept appearing at every step anyway, while the balance drained to zero. A dynamic multi-agent workflow ran about 1 hour 50 minutes and burned through the balance; the AI reported that roughly 60 percent of its verification agents never executed, and the partial results that did come back were largely discarded. The $200 bought an incomplete verification.

$200at stake
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
HobbiesPartly worked

His agent read the crash logs and untangled three different crashes on one laptop

A man's laptop crashed hard while he was working with the opencode agent. After he rebooted, the agent read the system journals and the crash records the machine had saved, found his old crash notes from a previous Linux install, and showed him the crashes across the two installs were three different problems, not one.

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

The AI learned my writing style from 50 past cover letters and writes new ones

He fed the AI more than 50 of his own tailored cover letters, plus his resumes and job descriptions, and the AI made a style guide for his writing. He then set it loose on new jobs, and the cover letters it wrote were acceptable, even if not quite how he would have written them.

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

The AI pulled my demand letter together from the whole email history

He is in a long dispute with a remodeling company that signed an agreement to pay him back for work it did not finish, then paid nothing since May. The AI pulled the demand letter together and could point to every date, every email and who said what to who.

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

An agent wrote my blog for six months. I fixed its work 67 times.

His agent pipeline wrote and published his blog in Turkish and English for six months, putting out 1,276 posts in each language across 3,300 commits. Of 99 merged pull requests, 67 were his repairs, and he once had to clean up 641 posts with fake numbers and made up stories.

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.