J.t. Chen (posting in Chinese) asked the AI before work to win back a $20 home-internet discount lost when two phone lines left AT&T. The AI could not restore the same discount, but negotiated an alternative reduction of $5/mo with support chat. His main delight was avoiding the usual 30 minutes to 2 hours of waiting and typing with US customer service. In comments he clarified the AI works over web text chat, not phone calls.
$5
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
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.
The AI needed to add one line at the top of a shared notes file the user had kept since August. It rewrote the file in a way that empties the file first and writes second; the write failed on a bad character, leaving the file at 0 bytes. The file survived only because an outside backup existed. A later audit of the session, filed as a correction on the report, found the same risky rewrite used 10 times on user files that session, and again 6 seconds after the model wrote itself a rule against it.
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Someone had the AI buy a domain on Namecheap through the secure vault. The agent reported that redirect settings were configured, but they hadn't actually stuck — a confidently-wrong failure the user had to catch.
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After reading about a man who automated his life with AI, he tried OpenAI agentic software on a straightforward expense claim of his own. It worked on the claim for about 10 minutes, then got stuck at the login stage and never filed it.
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Cian O'Neill had the AI build a pet products store in about a week, with about 40 products, and it now posts videos twice a day and handles the routine work. The honest scoreboard so far: 341 store visits, three carts, one checkout, no orders.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
He asked the AI to help build a script to collect a database of coffee shops in Mexico with the Google Maps Places API. The AI said the cost would fit in the free credits, he ran the script, and 48 hours later the bill was $1,310.05.
$1,310at stake
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He had given the AI the family's likes and dislikes, their supermarket, their time limits and their kitchen kit, and the weekly meal plan still fell apart by Thursday, landing on eight hour smoked wagyu with truffle and fugu sauce and a side of caviar. It hit the macro targets and missed everything that mattered. He does the plan himself again.
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Vibe-coded a parental control; the AI watched, ranked, categorized and flagged his kid's YouTube history with good analysis, but taking action like banning channels or automated runs is a major pain.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.