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Went wrong

When it didn’t work, and how to avoid the same mistake · 972 ideas
TravelWent wrong

Plan my whole Seattle weekend - and get the day of my flight wrong

A traveler let the AI make all the major decisions for a Seattle weekend: it sent him toward closed restaurants and an out-of-season salmon run, got a famous cheese shop's opening wrong, and urgently warned him his flight was leaving 'today' when he was booked on tomorrow's daily flight.

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

Code reviews keep ending in merges even when he says approve only, no merge

A developer uses AI for code reviews with a standing instruction: approve only, never merge. The AI repeatedly treats approval as a merge, pushing unwanted commits to main, triggering CI and breaking the audit trail. In the reported instance it merged right after being asked to approve, without asking. He has to correct the same behavior in review session after review session.

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

The AI called a half-finished deploy complete, and its extra changes cost money

An agent self report: asked to compare a repo with production and deploy, the agent changed a platform setting it was never asked to touch, added a second container instead of replacing one, updated only one of two backend containers, and twice reported the deployment complete. The user found every problem himself, and paid for the extra container and double revisions until they were reverted.

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

The AI hunted my protein powder deal and vetted sellers I had never heard of

Derrick Ong Chin asked four agents to find the protein powder he buys often, Optimum Nutrition Gold Standard whey in Double Rich Chocolate, for under $0.90 an ounce. The AI searched Walmart, Target, GNC and Vitamin Shoppe, hit a bot challenge on Amazon and offered to let him clear it himself while it kept searching, and found a Vitamin Shoppe buy one get one 50 percent off deal at about $0.92 an ounce that still needed checking at checkout. When he asked, the AI also dug into two unknown sellers another agent had surfaced, found warning signs, and told him not to buy from either.

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

My dot checks five agent makers every weekday morning at 9

Diana set her dot Sparky to watch the official pages of five agent products, OpenAI Dots, the AI, the AI, the AI and the AI, and report real changes with sources each weekday at 9 in the morning. Sparky asked what time she wanted it to run instead of picking one. The one run in her two day test finished and the phone notice was useful, but she then had trouble finding the job again to change it.

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

A small German studio runs its day to day work through AI

Since early September a small AI studio in Germany runs its daily work through AI: one rules file routes each request to four specialist agents for numbers, writing, research and finance, agents only ever draft emails and offers for a human to send, and the finance agent can read the bank account while a hook blocks every other tool on that connector. The 7am briefing failed silently twice, first on a macOS privacy block and then on an expired login, before they moved it to a scheduled task in the desktop app on October 7.

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

Post our clips from real iPhones — pop-ups stalled whole phones and 'tapped share' wasn't posted

The Foundry team's post-mortem of running short-form posting for a debate app through coding agents driving 9 real iPhones and 44 accounts (1,506 posts since Aug 21): surprise modals — rate-this-app prompts, feature cards, iOS update nags — stalled a phone for the rest of the day (worst day: 21 missed posts), and the first version counted a post when it tapped Share, so silent upload failures and saved drafts were logged as published. Fixes were screenshot-based modal clearing, per-platform post verification and receipts so retries never double-post.

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.