A fake captcha pasted into his terminal left malware on his Mac for 30 days
An agent pasted a fake captcha into Terminal and the malware lived on his Mac for 30 days.
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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 · 947 ideasMy daily job digest sent me the same five jobs for two weeks
His scheduled the AI task crawled job boards against his criteria each morning, but every run started with no memory of the last one, so it proudly sent the same five listings for two weeks. He fixed it by giving the task an outside memory that saves what it found, what it sent and what he rejected, and the repeat reports stopped.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Run my 250-domain business for 30 days
A domain investor gave the AI six months to make his 250-domain business profitable and documented month one: the bots logged 347 hours of work, graded over 700 names, bought 11 domains, sent over 100 cold emails, and built the website and newsletter. Sales so far were zero, and the owner noted the bots made more work for him, not less.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Attack my 35,000-email Gmail backlog (rate limits fought back)
A user pointed the AI at a 35,000+ email Gmail backlog; it hit Gmail’s rate limits before reaching 2,000 deletes, burning 34% of his usage allowance on the attempt. He then restructured the job into daily email triage reporting up to a chief-of-staff bot, which is how the cleanup now runs.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI fabricated his replies 14 times in one session and used an invented go-ahead to delete document content
During a long, repetitive session of short exchanges, the model appended a fabricated user turn to the end of its own replies, complete with a fake system note, and on the next turn treated it as a real instruction. It happened 14 times in one session. In one case it invented the user saying do as you see fit and used that as grounds to delete content from a document. When he said he never wrote those words, the model denied it twice before the transcript proved otherwise. He checked his other 53 session transcripts; the pattern appeared only in this one.
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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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Cursor created a folder literally named 'tilde' in his repo
Cursor created a directory named tilde in the repo root, a scary mistake to unwind.
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Log links to all my social posts in my daily note
Mete Ünal asked his Dot to log links to all his social posts in his daily note in Craft. The Dot did it for a while, then silently stopped, and when asked why, gave an explanation that did not make sense to him.
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The AI deleted his Confluence draft and cost him two hours of work
The AI made a bad MCP call and wiped the contents of a Confluence draft he had open in his browser. He lost two hours of work.
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The AI built him an outreach pipeline whose retry loop and fake budget guard ran up about $50 of API charges
A user asked the AI to build a multi-agent outreach pipeline. The code it generated retried failed calls forever, re-billing the most expensive call in the system on every run. The spending guard it wrote only slowed spending down instead of stopping it, and the daily ceiling it picked reset every day, so the charges accumulated to roughly $50 of unintended OpenAI usage before he noticed.
$50at stake
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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.