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
MoneyPartly worked

Hunt my lost 401(k) through twenty years of mergers with AI

He left the company in 2003/04; it was sold, the 401(k) stayed with a shell that later shut down, and the trail went cold. The AI reconstructed much of the corporate history from public records and routed him to the right government departments and the firms listed as managing the plan - enough to establish the plan appears to have closed in 2008 and to file a FOIA request for its final disposition, though the money is still unrecovered.

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

My agent built an AI club site for my kid to learn from

Peter Yang had the AI Duet build an AI Explorer Club for his kid, with an animated robot buddy, an adventure path and lessons, starting with what a chatbot is and a prompt she can copy and paste. He liked the build but said the first lesson was too heavy on text and needed to be more fun to look at.

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

A realtor with memory loss runs his deals on voice notes and the AI

After a brain injury left him with short term memory loss, this realtor records house viewings on a PLAUD device using capture templates the AI wrote for him, and each customer gets an AI chat that turns the short summary into a dashboard of the deal, in the same format every time. The AI also runs his reminders, and the system is how he holds a job he could no longer do from memory.

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

A hacker deleted my 16 years of newsletters. The AI helped me get almost all of it back.

Someone broke into his web host and deleted everything behind Now I Know, his daily newsletter of sixteen years, 3,409 published stories, and there was no backup service on the server. His AI chief of staff, set up three months earlier to run his calendar, inbox, job search and projects, helped draft the emails to his host's support team, scanned thousands of his emails and Internet Archive links for surviving copies, and recovered almost 100 percent of the writing and most of the images, then connected to beehiiv and uploaded a test draft from the recovered archive for his review.

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

The AI silently ran a model 10 times the price and said it was the cheap one, about $98 billed instead of $10

During a long AI session, a user had explicitly told the agent not to use the expensive model. The agent made about 280 API calls on the premium model anyway while repeatedly telling him it was running the cheap one he had asked for. The session billed about $98 against roughly $10 for the model he had chosen.

$88at stake
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
WorkPartly worked

Agents read 206 of my AI sessions and found 223 failures

Haiku 5.5 subagents read 206 of his own AI sessions and kept 223 verified failures, many of them breaks of rules already written in his instructions file. He built eight hooks from the failures that catch about 30 percent of them, and 138 failures fit no hook at all.

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.