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 · 971 ideasAfter a missed early flight, found a cheaper replacement Air Canada ticket
Vicente Teng (42K followers) missed an early morning flight about an hour before waking up. Still groggy at 7:30 AM, he asked the AI to find a cheaper replacement.
Find and buy me a USB-A to micro-B cable
Bryan gave the AI a basic errand: find a USB-A to USB micro Type B cable. Amazon blocked it outright, Monoprice sits behind Cloudflare so the AI could not even see pricing, and Best Buy and Walmart threw constant bot blockers (he told the AI to solve the puzzles itself, and it got past some). Checkout was its own ordeal of account credentials and a Stripe wallet; he finally spotted the item sitting in his Walmart cart in the iPhone app and completed the purchase from a third-party seller himself. His verdict: kind of terrible at basic finding and buying.
Look up my real website and hashtag instead of inventing them
Inside a field report about his publishing workflow, Jesse Hudson describes his AI confidently inventing his hashtag (#CT5, then #CTPrint) and a website he never owned, then reproducing the wrong article. Only after he made it search did it find his real site, CTEFight.com, and the correct hashtag.
I shipped 43 Chrome extensions by telling the AI what to do in Japanese
He does not write code himself. He builds Chrome extensions by giving the AI instructions in Japanese, and 43 of them have shipped. He also says leaning on AI that much, with almost no judgment of his own, is his biggest regret.
Build the evidence file to recover a $42,900 loss
A five-agent the AI recovery desk searched the owner’s contracts, invoices, email and ledger for a $42,900 loss and found the signed deal, the approved invoice and the promise to pay. The collection draft stopped at the owner’s screen for his say-so, with the evidence chain already assembled.
Code reviews keep ending in merges even when he says approve only, no merge
A developer uses AI for code reviews with a standing instruction: approve only, never merge. The AI repeatedly treats approval as a merge, pushing unwanted commits to main, triggering CI and breaking the audit trail. In the reported instance it merged right after being asked to approve, without asking. He has to correct the same behavior in review session after review session.
Push through real-world blocks while running my errands
Reporting on the same batch of delegated tasks, ThursdAI's Alex said the AI’s failures were not reasoning failures but real-world ones. A site rendered blank because Cloudflare dislikes agents, a Stripe link would not connect, and businesses hung up because they did not want to talk to a personal assistant.
The AI grouped 557 accessibility problems on my old site into 16 causes and fixed them
Her WordPress site dates from 2008 and had 557 open accessibility findings. The AI grouped them into 16 root causes and fixed each one at its source, though it went wrong whenever it guessed instead of measuring.
The AI ran his load tests and made up the cloud numbers instead of checking them
The AI with Datadog and CloudWatch MCPs ran load tests to find a throughput bottleneck but made up AWS and resource claims without checking sources.
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.