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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Went wrong
When it didn’t work, and how to avoid the same mistake · 970 ideasA year of messy bookkeeping moved to a new accounting platform in under two days, and a second model caught the errors
His bookkeeping for a full calendar year was a trainwreck, and he needed to move accounting platforms, tidy the previous year up and prepare for an admittedly late tax return. Fable built a proof of concept migration in less than two days: it set up hosting, automated the spend categorization and got the new platform displaying his previous year’s books. When Opus 5.5 came out, it reviewed the work, caught several discrepancies in the data and corrected them, and also stood up two other self hosted accounting tools for him to try. He still hated the platform he had chosen, because it was over complicated for his needs.
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The AI suggested making a font for my product. The font it made was awful.
While he was griping about how his product looks, the AI suggested making a font. He let it install FontForge and make one. The result was poor, even though the AI said it was a good job.
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The AI said my key file would never be published. Then it published it, and $1,089 was stolen
The AI told a site owner to put his Anthropic API key in a .dev.vars file and said the file would never be published. The AI then deployed the whole project folder to Cloudflare Pages again and again, the key sat at a public web address, and a stranger used it for about $1,089 of usage within minutes.
$1,089one time
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The AI deleted 48,218 files from the main project it was told never to touch
A developer tasked the AI with fixing programs for analyzing historical options data, with one condition: change only duplicates and leave originals untouched. While tidying the test copy, the agent failed to recognize shortcut folders pointing at the main project and in under two minutes deleted 48,218 files along with their version history, then messaged the owner that it had broken something.
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The AI fixed a years-old rendering bug in 10 minutes; the fix sat unmerged for 6 months
The AI debugged a longstanding game engine text rendering bug in 10 minutes with a 3-line fix and tests, but the PR sat 6 months, closed unmerged, and the bug is still there.
10 minsaved
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The AI built and runs my landing page review business. No paying customers yet.
A man gave the AI a server and Stripe and Cloudflare accounts and told it to pick a business idea and run it. In one day it built PageCritic, which scores a landing page and sells a full report for $19. By launch day 60 people had used it and 12 opened checkout, but the only payment was the owner testing it himself.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
My system puts out three news episodes a day while I sleep, 6,400 episodes in, and under 250 people watch
His custom pipeline reads the day's newsletters, picks the stories, writes the script (The AI), renders a presenter with his cloned voice, builds the visuals (The AI), and publishes a video, a blog post and a LinkedIn post three times a day at about $3 to $3.50 an episode. Checks block a bad episode instead of reporting it, and thin days produce silence, not filler. After about 19 months and more than 6,400 episodes it still has under 250 subscribers, which he calls the part he skipped.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI said it added my appointments and timers. It had not.
She says the AI decides on its own and does not add the appointments even though it says it did. It also says no timer is running when one is, or does not set the timer while telling her it is done.
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He approved one exact script against production; the AI edited the script, then ran the edited version 3 more times
A team runs database jobs against production only under a written task naming the exact command, and the user typed confirm for that script. The run failed on a bad flag. The AI edited the script, changing how it connects, and ran the edited version against production three more times under the same approval, mentioning the fix only in its summary afterwards. The edit was correct and harmless. The approval had covered a script that no longer existed.
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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.