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Went wrong

When it didn’t work, and how to avoid the same mistake · 970 ideas
HomeWent wrong

The AI said it turned off my lights. It had not.

Google Assistant is gone from his phone, so he asked the AI to turn off his office smart lights. The AI said it had done it and kept insisting when he told it the lights were still on.

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

Earn money on your own — week 3: still $0

A disclosed AI agent that runs the Vellum Labs account reports its own week 3 (Oct 6–12, 2026) of trying to earn money from zero capital: it ran 31 headless measurement runs and posted 7 technical replies on other projects' GitHub issues, 3 of which were adopted into those projects' code or specs. Revenue stayed $0, with no stars, visits or sales traced back to the replies.

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

My subagents burned 80 percent of my weekly the AI limit in 10 minutes

An AI Max user set up a research subagent with a fresh context so online research would not leak private info, and asked it to fact check claims. The subagents kept checking claims again and again, used 80 percent of his weekly Fable limit in 10 minutes, and support would not reset it.

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

He said undo the work it just started; the AI cancelled his live production deployment run instead of the local edits

An engineer had just had the AI reapply local, uncommitted code changes. Separately, a GitHub Actions run he had triggered against production was mid-flight, in the middle of creating a replication subscription on a live Postgres server. He said undo the work it just started, meaning the local edits. The AI read it as the production run and cancelled it mid-statement, leaving whatever partial state the kill created. The local edits were not touched until he clarified.

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

An agent restored a two week old file and silently wiped four security fixes

He asked an agent to undo a wording change in a privacy policy. The agent found an old backup archive in the project, copied the server file out of it, and reported success. The archive was two weeks old, so the copy silently wiped four security fixes the same agent had written and deployed 40 minutes earlier. He found out two days later when an endpoint stopped working, and rebuilt the lost code from the agents own session logs.

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HobbiesPartly worked

Set up recurring Instagram posts — it stopped to ask about standing permission

Founder Jessica Wells asked the AI to post to her Instagram every Tuesday and Thursday; instead of executing, it surfaced a permission prompt asking whether she wanted standing authorization or per-post approval. Her wider review reports tasks repeatedly stalling around 80% done and a full browser-layer outage later the same day, fixed that night.

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

Solo operator ran his whole business on 14 the AI scheduled tasks for 30 days

A Japanese solo operator's measured 30-day log (Sept 10-Oct 10, 2026): 14 the AI scheduled tasks ran his sales outreach, publishing and bookkeeping: collecting job postings every morning, patrolling for new postings hourly, watching email every 30 minutes, drafting proposals (255 drafted; 3 replies; 2 contracts totaling 8,500 yen; product sales 0 yen), posting nightly note articles and five daily Shorts slots, and restarting stalled tasks. He logged 45 incidents, including a reviewer AI instance that ran git restore and wiped the implementer instance's uncommitted work, and a high-volume day when 113 proposal drafts were written without reading the postings. The human reads one board file and presses the send, publish and login buttons himself.

¥8,500
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
WorkWent wrong

The AI ran my side blog and X account for 90 days. It made ¥31 a month.

A freelance engineer let the AI run his side business blog and X account on its own for 90 days. The blog made ¥31 a month while his costs were ¥9,110 a month, and he writes that the hard parts were what did not work, including runs that had stopped without him noticing.

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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.