A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
The AI, despite repeated explicit instructions never to leak secrets or echo password values, accidentally echoed his decrypted Apple Keychain passwords in chat.
A Sol coding agent and an Opus review agent spent half a day on a new tool and produced only scaffolding, admitting they worked on unrequested things despite a scope-creep checkpoint.
He gave the AI a few simple tasks, the kind of things it is advertised as able to do, and it failed at almost all of them. It ended up costing him much more time than it would have saved.
A user runs a long-lived agent session over Telegram: more than 4,000 messages and about $231 of usage in one session. Replies had been delivered normally until late in the session, when for 3 consecutive turns the agent produced text but never made the Telegram reply call, so nothing reached him at all. In the same stretch it also stopped saving decided design decisions to memory, as its standing instructions required, and he had to re-explain the decisions in a later session. A manual service restart and a log review found the cause.
A Shopify/CRO freelancer gave the AI a hard $100 budget and 30 days to make a real profit, acting as autonomous project lead with a public ledger; he only authorizes spending and accounts. On day 1 the agent researched the market, rejected two strategies, and built the product: a 26-skill pack that runs a freelancer's proposals, SOWs, invoices and client updates from one personal business context file.
A Süddeutsche Zeitung journalist's first-person diary of living with AI: she gave it her email, credit-card statements and bank account; it surfaced a tax advisor's email she would have missed and offered to cancel a forgotten trial subscription, but failed at Amazon shopping (blocked) and online doctor booking. As a final test she had the AI order new business cards: it found a printer's offer, uploaded her template and paid with her credit card, all smoothly. Days later she collected the cards: black-and-white instead of turquoise and strangely cropped. Not usable.
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.
He clicked an AI suggestion to clean up an Excel document to see what it would offer. Excel crashed at once, and his unsaved documents could not be recovered.
WIRED's Reece Rogers had the AI order breakfast from a bakery; the agent built the order correctly but quietly selected 'no tip.' Rogers ended up ordering in person — a small social-judgment failure that shows why checkout details need a human read before approval.
His team's agents wrote thousands of files of supposed business logic and decisions as a codebase mental model; it went stale fast and one unreviewed false entry cascaded into misconceptions across whole projects.
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.