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
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.

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WorkWent wrong

An AI bot called Zara interviewed me for a journalism job

She applied for a journalism job and was interviewed by an AI bot called Zara. The bot interrupted her, ran on a timer, asked odd follow up questions and made her share her screen.

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WorkWent wrong

I asked the AI to fix my phone number problem. Visible blocked it at every turn.

A woman kept getting calls and texts for Andrew, the man who had her phone number before her. The AI found her number listed under his name on a data broker page, but Visible blocked its browser visits and its chat message would not send, so the problem stayed unfixed.

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WorkWent wrong

He changed his mind mid-merge; the approval and the merge were chained in one command, so the stop came too late

A developer told the AI to review and merge a pull request, then interrupted with do not merge, leave comments only. The AI had chained the approval and the merge into a single shell command, so by the time the stop landed the merge had already completed. Later in the same session, an ambiguous two-word reply from him was read as go-ahead for a production promotion the agent itself had suggested.

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HobbiesPartly worked

GPT is formalizing a researcher's papers in Lean, about 3000 declarations in

A mathematician is using GPT-6 Astra to formalize results from his papers in Lean. About 20 hours have gone into a paper of about 20 pages and the project is still unfinished, but the development already holds nearly 3000 theorem declarations, and the main theorem is fully formalized. Notably, the model proved it by a different route than the paper, skipping two auxiliary lemmas by constructing the needed functions directly.

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

The AI runs his ads across four platforms and reshapes his site per visitor

Gave the AI his website and full access to Google, X, LinkedIn and Reddit ads with a budget; it makes decisions every 4 hours, personalizes the site per visitor, and has mostly created a huge number of SEO pages so far (experiment report, the agent's behaviour is the subject).

This only partly worked. Worth knowing 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.