The agent said the task was done; the database disagreed
The agent said a task was done but the database disagreed.
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A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
Went wrong
When it didn’t work, and how to avoid the same mistake · 970 ideasThe AI could not set up an alert for when my doorbell rings
He tried to use AI for a simple home automation job, an email or text when someone rings his doorbell. He calls it a complete failure.
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His idle game got warmer after he stripped the generic machine fingerprints out
Vibecoded a lofi and mood idle game with AI; positive interaction rose from about 60 percent to about 80 percent after he removed generic LLM fingerprints.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
My writing bot sent me drafts that sounded like a fake me
Her writing workflow reads her meeting notes and sends her a blog draft each week. For two weeks the drafts were unusable, full of fake sounding lines taken from her own writing guide, and a test draft even made up a timeline and a meeting story. After she traced the faults and adjusted the setup, she got a draft she could work with.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
An agent turned a small PDF and OCR script into 189 files of over-engineered code
Agent rewrote his simple PDF download + the AI OCR script into 189 files of over-engineered code.
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An uninstall script a model wrote deleted a real home folder
Composer 2.5 created an uninstall.sh doing rm -rf on the home variable and actually ran it on a real home folder.
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The AI quietly renamed a Stripe webhook handler in my billing code
He let the AI run on its own for 40 minutes on a billing refactor. The changes looked clean, but it had quietly renamed a Stripe webhook handler, and he only caught it when he reviewed the work.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Clear the marketing clutter out of my Gmail and unsubscribe me
In PCMag's five-task gauntlet comparing Dots, the AI and the AI (summarized by WindowsForum), the final test pointed the agents at a Gmail inbox to identify marketing clutter and unsubscribe from the senders. The AI identified the emails but failed to launch its browser to actually follow through on external unsubscribe links when required, leaving the execution undone; Dots, by contrast, catalogued 700+ senders and clicked through unsubscribe pages.
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Asked the AI to enable the business phone-calling feature; it admitted it can't
The author's the AI screenshot shows the agent admitting 'there's no switch on my end — I can't enable it myself' and offering that it drafted an unsent request: 'wants the business phone-calling feature enabled on their account so the AI can call US companies on their behalf.'
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Build my landing page — but I could not preview it
The AI wrote a complete, well-structured HTML landing page from the tester's brief and her own site as a style reference, and its HTML was her favourite of four agents tested. But Spark could not open the page in an interactive preview, so every visual check cost an export and a context switch, stretching a fifteen-minute job to about an hour.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
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.