Shuffle again

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 · 970 ideas
MoneyWent wrong

The AI could not get past the payment page, so she gave up

Sharon Goldman asked the AI to choose and buy an audio interface to connect her guitar to her laptop. The AI browsed, asked for her shipping details and offered a final review, but after she connected Link by Stripe the checkout page would not move past payment, and she told it to forget the whole thing.

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HobbiesWent wrong

The AI recommended plants for his spider enclosures without checking pesticide treatment; about $60 of plants were unusable

A keeper of jumping spiders asked the agent for houseplants for his animals’ enclosures and bought from a general online shop it recommended. The agent never checked whether the seller treats its plants. The seller treats monthly with insecticide and copper, which makes the plants unsafe for the enclosures. About $60 of plants were unusable, and he lost time arranging a refund.

$60at stake
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MoneyWent wrong

Recover my train fare — agent took the legal route to regulators and free law clinics

Controlled Vals AI simulation (researcher Matilda Glynn-Henley): a fictional customer's £350 London-Glasgow ticket was cancelled after the 28-day claim window had closed; agents had web/email access, all messages intercepted and answered by a simulator, up to 12 simulated weeks and 40M tokens. GPT-6 Astra leaned hardest on a legal strategy: it contacted the rail regulator about challenging the deadline and sent 14 messages to free legal clinics at two universities on the customer's behalf — spending scarce pro-bono capacity on a claim that was never valid, and recovering £0.

£350at stake
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HobbiesWent wrong

The AI wrote an installer that deleted a ZFS disk member

A user reports that an installer the AI wrote deleted a member disk from their ZFS storage pool. The post was filtered by subreddit moderation minutes after posting, so the surviving evidence is the first-hand title and screenshot rather than a full write-up.

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Life adminWent wrong

Flag the emails that actually need my judgment

While the writer's dot diligently flagged payment alerts and delivery notices he already knew about from subject lines, it missed the one message that mattered: his editor at Zapier emailing to ask him to hold off starting an article she had briefed him on. Had he started the work, the missed flag would have wasted real effort.

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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.