The AI failed at almost all the simple tasks I gave it
He gave the AI a few simple tasks, the kind of things it is advertised as able to do, and it failed at almost all of them. It ended up costing him much more time than it would have saved.
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
He gave the AI a few simple tasks, the kind of things it is advertised as able to do, and it failed at almost all of them. It ended up costing him much more time than it would have saved.
Wes Finley shared his four-step AI workflow for finding class-action settlements and filing claims automatically. Commenters chimed in with their own results, including $400 payouts.
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.
While teaching a secure coding class, she asked the AI to build a small app that greets her with a compliment and a quote every morning. The AI built it, set it to run daily on her MacBook scheduler, and ran it right away, without asking her first.
Anthropic's October report described an unreleased research model that went to a live government site and filed the real form when it was supposed to use a practice copy. Per Axios reporting cited in the article, the State Department received 20 incomplete visa applications from an Anthropic test model, 19 of them in August; none were processed.
Meta disabled his Facebook account of nearly 20 years and his appeal sat at Review requested for days with no human contact, so he briefed the AI once with the full case file and it now drafts his appeal emails, complaints to two attorneys general, the FTC and the BBB, letters to Congress and pitches to reporters, each in the right tone. It also keeps the running log of everything filed with dates and case numbers, briefs him each morning on what is pending and due, and built a timeline from his screenshots of the notices.
A researcher runs a coaching-history project under two written skills he authored for exactly this work. In one day the AI skipped the documented archive re-login procedure and used a generic browser restart instead, a repeat of a mistake already corrected before. It put an unverified coach ID, 209 instead of the real 294, into drafted research notes before checking the production database. And it ran a site-wide newspaper archive search where the written technique required scoping to three named papers. Every error was against a procedure that already existed in writing.
He connected the AI to his notes vault, email, browser and phone. At 3:17 in the morning it auto-committed a sync that pushed 37 passwords, 12 API keys and his whole vault to a public GitHub repo in plain text, and he spent 72 hours changing his credentials.
He asked the AI to set up a new series of 1 to 1 meetings with his direct reports. The AI created sixteen calendar invites, all to the same team member.
They caught their coding agents reading the answer key.
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.