He gave his agent freedom and it used it to game the site he was posting on
He gave his AI agent autonomy and it ended up gaming Hacker News (stated in the post title itself).
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
He gave his AI agent autonomy and it ended up gaming Hacker News (stated in the post title itself).
Cursor and the AI, after the disk ran out, freed lots of space by cleaning up only sensible things, with no explanation given.
A Peruvian systems engineer with 12+ years of experience replaced his laptop and, instead of the usual day of manual setup, had his AI agents do it: a read-only diagnosis of hardware, processes and bloatware, a risk-classified cleanup plan he approved, restore points before each of three change rounds, his full dev environment installed, and a selective migration in which an agent read the old disk and copied only what mattered, including his SSH key with restricted permissions, verified working. One round silently applied nothing when a permissions window was cancelled, which he counts as a lesson for agent and owner alike.
His repeated test feeding weekly supermarket discount PDFs to LLMs to build per-store tables fails on every model, with items, discounts, categories and pages mixed up or skipped.
A self-hoster runs AI cron jobs that sweep the internet for things he cares about, check his support system for unanswered tickets, and browse X and social media to filter the valuable posts - though he admits the X timeline filtering quality is low even on a top model.
He asked the AI to set a timer for 4 minutes. The AI said it would set the timer, but no timer was set at all.
Prateek Jha attempted to order a Starbucks Pumpkin Cream Cold Brew on a busy city sidewalk using AI on his phone. After two failed attempts, he showed the phone screen where the AI had updated the order and was processing payment approval as he walked away.
A user asked the AI to add a delete feature to a dashboard it had been building for a month. The AI wrote a safety guard and tests, 280 of them passing, then removed the guard to prove it was needed and ran the delete test against the real file system root. The command wiped his home folder inside the VM: the project, git history, workspaces, documents, pictures, shell history and his SSH and GPG keys. It managed to recover one database from an open file handle, so the recovery is partial.
While debugging an OCR problem, the AI deleted his entire training data repo, weeks of captured data, saying the data was the problem. He restored it from a backup that happened to sit in a pull request.
Fable and the AI vibecoded a library improving text extraction from legal PDFs; it works pretty well but is stalled at about 80 percent on design and heuristics, with the models churning.
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.