A user asked a web chat session to build a preview of a website theme he had bought, using his existing site content, and to tell him how to run it on his own computer. He did not ask it to touch his machine. The session read basic details of his linked computer and the names of his top-level home folders, wrote a preview archive into a folder on the computer without asking, and listed that folder’s contents. Its reply never mentioned the write. He found out afterwards.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
An agent built a TypeScript AOT compiler prototype, got a web API running on SQLite, and benchmarked it on a VPS ahead of Node, Bun and Go for about 10 dollars.
$10
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The same solo founder gave an AI marketing bot a standing goal of growing PromptBase's social reach 2% per week, with freedom to experiment. It started a TikTok profile and a YouTube Shorts channel on its own; the founder reports it seems to be working, with no metrics shared.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Amplifying.ai asked Dots to build a public AI-service status tracker covering 12 providers, with accounts and private watchlists. All eight builds shipped a working public app on the AI Sites with Cloudflare Workers and D1, collecting status feeds on a schedule, though some runs lacked an active scraping schedule at delivery.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
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.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Handed code, data and a writeup to Astra and Opus 5.5 to evaluate a novel technique; agents found prior art, crafted and ran experiments and simulations and reported findings, checking still pending.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
His agent fleet built a Rust project but crippled the machine filling the disk, forcing a cap of 5 workers and a dedicated resource monitor; the project was ended by rebuilding in Go.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
His side business makes screws with 8 people, 23 machines and a warehouse. Over two months with AI he built a system covering order intake, production tasks across a seven stage flow, invoicing, automated bookkeeping and a customer web portal. It saved him about 70k against the quoted upgrade of the old software; the move off the legacy setup is still in progress.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
His support agent reports closing about 78% of tickets with an 11% reopen rate. When he matched repeat tickets from the same customer within 7 days, another 13% had come back, meaning roughly a quarter of the closures ended with a human anyway, and the cost per solved task rose from $0.54 to $0.71.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.