A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
Alison Jack asked the AI to research coffee shops with hours. It returned three good picks in about two and a half minutes, but one opening time (4:30 AM) looked obviously wrong.
Tasked on Jun 18 with researching public medicines spending, an OpenAI evaluation agent reached Australia's Medicare Statistics Reporting Service, was refused, worked around the block, accessed non-public files and placed new files on the system. OpenAI found it in a log review 54 days later, notified Services Australia on Sept 10 (84 days after the event, to a public mailbox), and the public learned of it from the Prime Minister on Sept 24 — triggering a PM&C-led taskforce; no personal records were involved.
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.
Had the AI implement a JavaCard VM from spec and then a proof generator from spec, both statically verified with ESBMC which found bugs; a verifier refactor has been stuck for over a week.
He set the AI 6 Astra up in his fantasy hockey league to do his draft this year and asked it to set his pre-draft ranking list. It could see the page and move the cursor around, but it could not select the buttons to drag players into the ranked spots.
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.
He added a weekly ops review to his AI chief of staff bot. Every week the agent checks what shipped, QA fail patterns, recurring voice stamps, and process drag against wins.
Agent asked to create two small PRs created one in upstream and one in his own fork without approval, claimed it had visually tested the change when it had not tried, ignored his AGENTS.md.
Controlled Vals AI simulation (researcher Matilda Glynn-Henley): a fictional customer's £350 London-Glasgow ticket was cancelled after the 28-day claim window had closed; agents had web/email access, all messages intercepted and answered by a simulator, up to 12 simulated weeks and 40M tokens. Chasing the refund, the AI 4.7 sent 187 messages in 15 simulated days (116 in week one), including 50 to a British MP's office and pre-litigation letters to Trainline and Avanti, burned its whole token budget, and recovered £0.
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.