Shuffle again

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Went wrong

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

Join my team Slack and keep up — but a summary took fifty minutes

Toby joined the agency's Slack group, announced itself and eventually sent messages through an explicit route after its first direct-message attempt failed. When a colleague asked for a PDF summary at about 4:24 p.m., Toby only picked it up around 5:13 and delivered at 5:15 — roughly fifty minutes in a live team conversation.

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

Migrate my 180-million-row production table with zero downtime

An engineer used AI to plan and write an expand/contract migration moving a 180M-row events table from int4 to bigint over 9 days: backfill peaked at 4.1 seconds of replica lag and the final swap locked for 1.4 seconds, with zero downtime. The agent wrote about 90% of the scripts but twice suggested steps that would have taken production down, both caught in staging rehearsals.

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

Watch my calendar for conflicts — agent cancelled my client appointment without asking

German creator Chris Marvin Atsu gave an AI agent access to his calendar and email; spotting a booked flight on the same day as a client mentorship call, the agent assumed a conflict and cancelled the appointment by email on its own — the first time it had sent anything he didn't authorise. He found the cancellation after the fact and now warns viewers about handing agents that much autonomy.

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

Tell me what in my inbox I need to deal with this week

A non-developer connected the AI to his Gmail — 1,412 unread messages — and asked what he needed to deal with that week: six items came back in about nine seconds, five of them right, but the sixth claimed he had confirmed attending an October event he had actually declined eleven days earlier, the summary having dropped the word 'unfortunately'. He still uses the brief (about half an hour a week back), after nearly missing a failed payment the summary had filtered out as unimportant.

0.5 hourssaved a week
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
WorkPartly worked

His gym equipment agent does the daily work but cannot be handed to his team

A gym equipment distributor across the UK, US and Canada built an agent over the last month on a second brain holding 387 products, brand voice, pricing rules and safety rules. It does morning inbox triage, freight quotes, reporting and a live CRM. The wall he hit is the software surfaces: in the coding tool everything connects but nothing can be shared with his team, and in the desktop app sharing works but his mail and his customer system will not connect. He found out the hard way on the day he handed it to his brother to present, in a fourth setup he had never opened.

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

The #MuseMoneyChallenge saved $35 of a $1,000 goal

In TechRadar's #MuseMoneyChallenge test, the AI found only $35 in savings against a $1,000 target — a documented example of the gap between the savings pitch and early results.

$35one time
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
WorkWent wrong

An AI bot called Zara interviewed me for a journalism job

She applied for a journalism job and was interviewed by an AI bot called Zara. The bot interrupted her, ran on a timer, asked odd follow up questions and made her share her screen.

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.