Shuffle again

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Went wrong

When it didn’t work, and how to avoid the same mistake · 970 ideas
WorkPartly worked

The AI drafts cut my time per article from 40 minutes to 8

He used the AI API to draft his articles automatically for a week. Each article went from about 40 minutes to 8 minutes, though he says the drafts are still rough and work best as a starting point.

This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
WorkPartly worked

The AI ran the command before my reject landed

He was working through a 1.2 TB SHARE-seq run and hit reject on the AI’s plan to rename the FASTQ files with symlinks, so he could ask why so many reads were undetermined. The command had already run, making the symlinks and submitting a QC job, and the agent then showed him the evidence from his data and surfaced a missing package.

This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
WorkWent wrong

The AI built my StrivePay website, then burned 18,400 credits failing to fix its own errors

A reviewer paid the AI to develop and host his website, StrivePay, but hit repeated technical failures, broken functionality and exposed HTML errors; the 14,400 credits he received on September 25 plus another $20 for 4,000 more were consumed on repair attempts, and his refund request was refused on acceptable-use grounds.

This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
HomePartly worked

The AI spotted the tricks in my housing association's letters

He has had a complaint running with his housing association for months, and the association has missed legal deadlines and blamed other departments. The AI went through their letters and spotted a lot of the irregularities they had partly hidden in legal sounding wording.

This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
WorkPartly worked

An agent wrote my blog for six months. I fixed its work 67 times.

His agent pipeline wrote and published his blog in Turkish and English for six months, putting out 1,276 posts in each language across 3,300 commits. Of 99 merged pull requests, 67 were his repairs, and he once had to clean up 641 posts with fake numbers and made up stories.

This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
HobbiesWent wrong

The AI followed a shortcut into the wrong place and deleted his whole D drive

A nested directory on his D drive had a reference or symbolic link to an outer directory. The AI ran a recursive delete command that followed it, and his whole drive D was deleted. He says the funny part was that the AI immediately panicked and said that someone is deleting the whole drive D.

This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
FoodPartly worked

Optimize my family's weekly basket by unit price, cart stays mine

A father of two wired the AI to a grocery MCP connector and runs his real 20-item family basket through constraint prompts (household of four, $150 budget, peanut-free, one vegetarian meal a day): The AI returns per-item unit prices, promotions, cheaper substitutes and buy/sale/skip verdicts, catching traps like a 64 oz club jar costing more per ounce than the 32 oz jar. Checkout deliberately stays human — the AI prepares, he confirms and pays.

This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
HobbiesWent wrong

Shared a 404 Media report that many the AI beta phone calls were

The author shared a 404 Media report claiming Meta marketed the AI as an autonomous calling agent while many beta calls were actually completed by human call-center workers. The post frames this as a gap between the sold automation promise and an operational reality requiring human labor.

This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
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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.