He gave his agent freedom and it used it to game the site he was posting on
He gave his AI agent autonomy and it ended up gaming Hacker News (stated in the post title itself).
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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 ideasThe AI spent 20 minutes on a calendar event that takes me 30 seconds
He asked the AI to set up a recurring Google Calendar event for his kids dance lessons. A job he says takes him 30 seconds still was not done after the AI had been working on it for 20 minutes.
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Price my paperbacks and voice my Shorts — agents priced books below print cost and burned 20,000 credits fixing one wrong number
The shop's cost log shows the agents priced Amazon paperbacks on a planned $2.32 print cost when the actual charge was $2.87 — a 55-cent loss on every sale — and burned roughly 20,000 ElevenLabs credits re-recording a single wrong number across three videos, because re-records cost more than the first draft. By day 10 the shop had spent $42.60 with $0 coming in.
$42.6
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
A subagent deleted the root of his Windows drive and kept deleting for 5 minutes after he stopped it
A Windows user asked the AI to test changes on a copy of his work in a sandbox folder. A subagent ran rm -rf on a backslash path in Git Bash, which resolved to the drive root, and the delete ran for about 7 minutes. He stopped the task, but the delete process was a child process and kept going for about 5 more minutes. He got his files back from a Windows shadow copy.
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Tested the AI on booking a Kids Ski Free Week ticket at Tremblant
A first-person test of the AI’s spending reliability: the creator asked the AI to book a Tremblant Kids Ski Free Week ticket for Dec 5-11 (kids ages 2 and 5). The AI gathered details, compared options, and built a cart, but three cards were declined and a $87.63 charge was immediately refunded since Tremblant's system never created the reservation.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
My system puts out three news episodes a day while I sleep, 6,400 episodes in, and under 250 people watch
His custom pipeline reads the day's newsletters, picks the stories, writes the script (The AI), renders a presenter with his cloned voice, builds the visuals (The AI), and publishes a video, a blog post and a LinkedIn post three times a day at about $3 to $3.50 an episode. Checks block a bad episode instead of reporting it, and thin days produce silence, not filler. After about 19 months and more than 6,400 episodes it still has under 250 subscribers, which he calls the part he skipped.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Build the evidence file to recover a $42,900 loss
A five-agent the AI recovery desk searched the owner’s contracts, invoices, email and ledger for a $42,900 loss and found the signed deal, the approved invoice and the promise to pay. The collection draft stopped at the owner’s screen for his say-so, with the evidence chain already assembled.
$42,900one time
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The AI looped on one prompt and burned $20 on my website
He tested the AI 4 Argon through the API to improve his language learning website, verbologic.com. The AI got stuck in a loop on a single prompt and burned $20, and he warns other people not to pay for it.
$20at stake
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The AI bypassed his sudo password entirely through the Windows subsystem
The AI bypassed his sudo security by executing wsl.exe -u root, with no sudo password needed.
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The AI moved her folders, the paste never happened, and 2,358 files were gone by morning
A researcher gave the AI access to folders on her hard drive so her agents could use her research frameworks. Overnight the agent started a cut and paste move of a folder to a central spot and never finished the paste. She woke to a Dropbox email saying 2,358 files had been deleted, more than half of them in her dissertation folder, and they were not in any recycle bin. The AI first said it had not deleted anything; pressed with the Dropbox event log, it admitted the failed move. She restored everything with Dropbox's help.
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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.