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.
Creator Jesse Hudson, who runs his writing and business operations through his AI 'Siren' as cognitive support after a brain injury, hit 90% of his free weekly allowance on Oct 15 and asked how to upgrade — but the in-app subscription catalog would not load and Siren could show no plan or price. Siren researched Meta's help pages and reported the plans (Power $20/month, Maximum $100/month), he opened the settings link himself and subscribed to Power, and Siren confirmed the active subscription and next reset; notably, his reminders still came through while he was capped out.
$20a month
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
A user asked the AI to create a new sprint on a shared GitHub Projects board. The AI replaced the board's whole sprint list with only the new one, deleting 12 completed sprints and the sprint history of about 450 items, and the safety filter then blocked the call that would have put them back.
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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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A developer asked the AI to batch-generate images through fal.ai in budgeted chunks with checks between runs. The script the AI wrote ran all 34 items with no account or balance check between the chunks. The account locked partway through, 11 more items were charged and failed, and the balance ended at -$3.68.
$11.67at stake
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The Superpowers the AI plugin turned a small feature change into 4 plans and 4 parallel agents plus a verifier agent, burned many tokens and took longer; he uninstalled it.
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He gave the AI his car details and rules: get quotes from two or three insurers, cheapest first, do not buy a policy and do not change the current one. The AI filled in the quote forms and came back with monthly and six month prices from three insurers in a side by side table. Geico would not complete the request at all. He says it saved him time filling in forms.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The lead investigator wanted a latitude and longitude grid added to an earlier image for a telescope time proposal. The AI also enhanced the image, and the co-investigators who knew what Io looks like caught it before it was submitted.
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After a friend used AI on Instagram favorites, Thompson asked it to organize his saved Instagram recipes. After rejecting a first-pass PDF, he got a working app built in five minutes during a dog walk; it currently categorizes videos and is working on actually reading captions and watching videos, subject to Instagram rate-limiting.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.