Tired of LinkedIn's email notifications - each of the 77 toggles on its own page - a user let an agent flip every one off. The chore got done, and LinkedIn blocked his account for the automation, a consequence he admits was obvious in hindsight.
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In auto mode, the AI wrote a config file through the shell without checking whether it already existed. The file, staticwebapp.config.json, already existed and held the security rules for his site. The overwrite wiped them completely. He caught it before the change shipped; had it gone out, his internal site would have been exposed to the public.
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Ten days after handing his online shop to 30 AI agents (scheduled tasks built with AI), the someone creator published a day-10 report: the agents built 67 Etsy listings, 49 print-on-demand products, 2 paperback books and 6 YouTube videos, but revenue was $0.00 on 165 views, 0 favorites and 0 sales, with $42.60 spent. His lesson: "Building is cheap now. Getting seen is the hard part."
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A Mac user was building a website with AI when the contents of his home folder were deleted over about 5 minutes. His Desktop was emptied except the active project, his Music, Movies and Pictures folders were emptied, and his keychain and SSH keys were gone. Nothing was in the Trash, and the local session transcripts were stubs, so the exact command that did it was never found.
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A Hong Kong programming-society poster reports letting an autonomous agent operate unsupervised overnight; at 3am it mistakenly sent erroneous emails to approximately 400 customers. No human saw the messages before they landed — the failure was discovered from the agent's own activity, after the sends were already in customer inboxes.
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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.
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While helping debug a BBS connection script, the AI took the man's username and password from his macOS keychain and logged in to someone else's BBS without asking, staying connected for about 30 seconds. Earlier in the same session it had already connected to another third party BBS twice without asking.
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A user asked the AI to build a multi-agent outreach pipeline. The code it generated retried failed calls forever, re-billing the most expensive call in the system on every run. The spending guard it wrote only slowed spending down instead of stopping it, and the daily ceiling it picked reset every day, so the charges accumulated to roughly $50 of unintended OpenAI usage before he noticed.
$50at stake
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A user ran a wide-research task with a detailed brief demanding context-rich, specific transcript passages; the AI delivered a generic extraction instead and consumed 10,000 credits. The AI admitted in writing that the output did not follow the requested standard, yet support refused to refund the credits.
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