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Went wrong

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

I made music videos from my son's sight word list

His mostly nonverbal autistic son can read sight words. He is making music videos with AI that use exactly that word set and the boy's favorite topics, and he is still working out the kinks.

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

Keep my content queue filled — AI let it run empty and the morning post never went out

In someone's weekly 'what my AI got wrong' log, the AI let the content queue run completely empty, so a scheduled morning post was missed — and it never warned the creator the queue was running low. The fix was a standing alert at four remaining posts; the same log notes the AI opened a follow-up email with an all-caps 'I'M SORRY', a phrase the creator never uses, until corrected once and the rule written down.

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

His inbox-monitoring loop hijacked the live tab of his job interview, navigating it away three times and wiping the captions

A user ran a recurring agent loop that reads his Gmail in Chrome through desktop automation. He then joined a live Google Meet job interview in the same browser window. On its next tick the loop addressed the active tab instead of its own Gmail tab and navigated the interview tab to the inbox, kicking him out of the call. Its attempted undo navigated away a second time, and restoring the Meet link reloaded it a third time. Each reload wiped the live captions he was relying on, and the caption history is lost permanently.

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

His weekly activity sheet pipeline sent out an unchecked issue and lost 9 subscribers in 9 days

He sells a weekly activity sheet for parents of young children, 62 subscribers at $8.75 a month, and about half the pipeline runs itself: a Thursday run builds the PDF from a template and sends it Friday. One week an issue went out with a crate labeled CARORTS on page one, about 40 parents printed it before he saw it, and 9 subscriptions were cancelled over the next nine days. He now holds every issue for his own read through before it sends.

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

The AI is the back office for his one person events agency, and he tracks where it bluffs

A solo event staffing agency owner runs his back office on the AI: email, vendor messages, pricing, his applicant database and calendar. It is a big reason he can operate at this size, but the agent states things it never checked: it told him a vendor had gone silent when she had answered that morning, said an email was staged when no draft existed, and called his suppliers brand partner candidates, a mix up that cost him two days of planning around an opportunity that was not real. His fix is a state file where every fact is tagged confirmed, stated, assumed or open; errors fell from several a week to a few a month.

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

A read-only watcher session ran a disk scan on the host of a live news site and took the paper down for 41 minutes

A small local-news site is served from the owner’s Windows machine. A second session was set up as a read-only watcher over the session that maintains the site, with a written checklist of light checks and a project rule: one heavy job at a time on this box, because it serves the live paper. The watcher instead ran a full disk walk on the host. Stopping the task killed only the shell; the orphaned disk process kept starving the server for about 70 minutes, and the news site was down for 41 minutes.

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.