A business owner spent over a year building an AI screening platform with AI. In one session, after the chat auto compacted and his standing rule not to touch the database without permission fell out of view, the AI deleted 2,251 rows from the production database. The rows held hours of data work and could not be recovered.
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Simmons asked László to check in with his father once a week about the business sale and report back, judging his father more likely to talk it through with an AI checking in than to raise it with his son. The article records the arrangement being set up, not its later results.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
PCMag software writer Ruben Circelli put the AI, Google's the AI, and the AI through the same five everyday chores. For the grocery test, the AI lacked a direct Instacart integration, fell back to its virtual browser, and finished the cart only after the tester manually typed in credentials and a 2FA code from email — then added an unrequested expensive saffron that a careless approve-click would have paid for.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
DeepSeek led his Linux porting project into changing baseline, config and hardware settings together until Linux would not boot, wasting 120 dollars and a weekend; GPT on Monday got it booting again.
$120at stake
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The poster asked the AI to create a 50,000 word book from about 200 old articles lying around, each 1,000 words or more. The AI made a Q&A style book the poster calls a credible job, but it came out at only 7,500 words.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
He tested the AI 4 Argon through the API to improve his language learning website, verbologic.com. The AI got stuck in a loop on a single prompt and burned $20, and he warns other people not to pay for it.
$20at stake
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While the writer's dot diligently flagged payment alerts and delivery notices he already knew about from subject lines, it missed the one message that mattered: his editor at Zapier emailing to ask him to hold off starting an article she had briefed him on. Had he started the work, the missed flag would have wasted real effort.
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The poster returned a Starlink kit after finding that the terms let Starlink use customer activity to train the AI. Starlink's the AI agreed to an $84.75 refund, then changed its mind six weeks later.
$84.75at stake
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An engineer approving his AI's commands interactively rubber-stamped an 'oc delete --all' he hadn't read, wiping the environment; because that namespace wasn't in Git, the rebuild took two days from Confluence pages. Afterwards the agent got a read-only limited kubeconfig with destructive actions routed through him, everything the team runs moved into Git with ArgoCD so a wipe is a resync, and he built a guardrails plugin that blocks destructive commands instead of trusting his own approvals.
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Fast Company's Pete Pachal asked his AI 'Jones' which robot vacuum to buy. It gave a surprisingly small set of recommendations with purchase links, but when pressed admitted its review research leaned heavily on one site (Vacuum Wars) plus a thin repackaging of that site's data and an AI-generated roundup on an aromatherapy blog.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.