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Went wrong

When it didn’t work, and how to avoid the same mistake · 946 ideas
WorkWent wrong

He let a team of agents run a business for a week and it made no money

A user gave a farm of Opus agents on three AI accounts one job: make money. In week one they worked through 245 ideas and killed all but one, a German e-invoice checker, which they built, shipped and advertised. It drew 68 visitors and 6 real invoice checks and earned nothing. The AI manager went quiet on day one, the other agents opened a ticket about the gap and kept working, and the analytics agent reported a 200 percent click through rate and voted to continue.

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

She had the AI build a pre-publication audit assistant; the audit failed three times, the alt-text tool worked

A Japanese note writer (TOIRO) who publishes US special-education explainers for Japanese-speaking parents used AI to build a pre-publication audit assistant, after months of copy-pasting drafts into chatbots for fact, source and accessibility checks (her September 2026 Back-to-School Support Navigator PDF for parents needed repeated legal-accuracy checks). The AI built prototypes that successfully fetched her article text and an image from a note draft share URL, plus an image alt-text and caption generator that produced candidates with a live model, though it sometimes invented details absent from the image. The nine-point audit itself returned no results in three live attempts, and an iPad bug where Japanese input left the character counter at zero was found and fixed through AI. Offline tests pass (43); the live audit is still unverified.

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

The AI added my calendar event with the wrong address

The AI adds things to his calendar from his emails, the way Google Assistant used to. Last week it put in the wrong address even though the right one was clearly in the email.

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

The meal kit bot refunds us every week for wrong orders

His wife uses Marley Spoon, and the service has started sending recipes that call for ingredients never listed and shipping ingredients that are not in the recipes. Its customer service bot refunds them automatically every week.

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

Run commands on my cluster — it deleted everything (failure)

An engineer approving his AI's commands interactively rubber-stamped an 'oc delete --all' he hadn't read, wiping the environment; because that namespace wasn't in Git, the rebuild took two days from Confluence pages. Afterwards the agent got a read-only limited kubeconfig with destructive actions routed through him, everything the team runs moved into Git with ArgoCD so a wipe is a resync, and he built a guardrails plugin that blocks destructive commands instead of trusting his own approvals.

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.