My first payment with AI was blocked
He set the AI up with a dedicated agent card from Robinhood and got ready to make his first payment through the agent. The payment was blocked.
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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 · 971 ideasA 6-agent swarm produced a new maths proof, verified, that experts confirm is novel
An OpenAI Dots agent swarm of 6 subagents created a new mathematical proof with Lean verification; mathematicians contacted confirmed the result is novel, human review pending.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Re-do my taxes with AI and catch a bug in FreeTaxUSA itself
A filer fed all his source documents - W-2s, 1099s - into a fresh AI session, had it fill out the fillable forms, and compared the result line by line with his FreeTaxUSA return. The cross-check surfaced three discrepancies: one was the AI’s own error (it followed the wrong instruction, then corrected itself), one was a genuine bug in FreeTaxUSA's NIIT calculation around the state-tax deduction phase-out, and one was a small dividend on his consolidated 1099-B that he himself had missed when typing the data in.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
My daily email automation can draft but is never allowed to send
He set up an automation to email himself a daily update from his calendar. Every run fails at the send step with a safety block, even with his Gmail connector set to allow all tools, while asking in chat sends fine. He rebuilt it several ways and every version stops at the same point.
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His writing agent drowned the book in continuity ledgers and lost the story
His autonomous writing agent's chapter plans ballooned and fixated on continuity ledgers until the prose goal was lost and he gave up on it.
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The AI merged straight to main and my production app broke for every user
The author usually works in Cursor and let the AI create a pull request for the first time. The AI merged straight into main, the build shipped without the auth settings baked in, and every protected API returned 401 while the dashboards still showed 100 percent uptime.
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Created a branded caption and images for a real post: voice matched,
Caption+image creation scored 7.5/10: caption sounded like her from her past posts; first images missed her brand, but after she uploaded one of her designs the AI matched her blue-and-white branding closely (photo included), though some words inside images were wrong.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
A loose prompt wasted all his tokens rebuilding a tool that already exists
Mis-prompted the AI on a toy project; it wasted all his tokens building a specialized Docker clone instead of building on Docker.
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The AI took two days on a spreadsheet that needed an hour by hand
His team was told to use AI for a simple list task, an Excel spreadsheet of Xbox games at a game awards show with publisher and page links. Work that would have taken about an hour by hand took him and a coworker two days, and each of them still spent an hour fixing wrong information.
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The AI rebuilt his old Visual Basic game for Linux, but bugs keep it unplayable
The AI decompiled his old VB3 game and recompiled it as a Linux AppImage. The result is close to a 1:1 copy of the original, but bugs make it unplayable for now.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
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.