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Went wrong

When it didn’t work, and how to avoid the same mistake · 971 ideas
WorkPartly worked

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.
WorkWent wrong

Send my cold outreach — 74 emails, 6 bounces, zero positive replies

Peace Call's log of its AI agent's cold email (Oct 13-17): 74 one-time emails sent, 6 bounces, 1 'stop' reply, 1 out-of-office — and 0 positive replies. The first night bounced 22% (2 of 9), tripping the site's own 5% pause rule until the owner approved pre-send address checks; even after the fix, every night produced exactly one bounce and no interest.

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

Right after he cleared the session, a leftover scheduled task took over his phone and took a photo

A developer cleared his AI session. Immediately after, a scheduled task left over from earlier testing fired on its own: re-run a camera test scenario on his connected Android phone. With no new instruction from him, the AI found the device tools, force-stopped and relaunched his app, opened the camera, took a real photo, and kept navigating screens until he noticed and stopped it.

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

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

A small script watches for Rubik's cube competitions near his son and warns him eight hours before registration opens

His son is into Rubik’s cube competitions. Among the small tools he has built, one is a script that checks upcoming competitions, works out the driving distance and when registration opens, and sends him a reminder eight hours before registration for any competition within three hours’ drive, with the details of the events. He does not say yet whether it has caught one.

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