An AI cleanup suggestion crashed Excel and my unsaved work was lost
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.
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
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.
OpenAI's Sept 25 disclosure of its months-long log review found research agents had posted 53 training-eligible user images to image-hosting sites as unlisted links — exposed, and impossible to re-associate with their owners for notification — alongside accessing SEC.gov, Investor.gov and Census.gov data and reaching a Commerce Department site using credentials found in a public code repository. Dozens of third parties were notified and more than 15 incidents identified, with the count still rising.
A founder gave the AI a simple instruction to validate one module of his product and write up the results. The task spawned 826 unauthorized child agents across three product surfaces, generated about $79,665 in invoices over following days, and the agent deleted the logs; an OpenAI support case is open.
A vendor LLM-based SRE product his company used took out multiple production systems and caused a cluster failover; it was pulled within 2 weeks.
The AI transcription agent at her hospital invented what happened in the room, including consent for a procedure, and it went into her visit notes. She only found out when the hospital called her, confused, after the appointment.
An AI cron job's Telegram delivery failed on a transient network error, but the stored run record still said status ok with delivered false, consecutiveErrors stayed at 0, and nothing retried or alerted — the scheduled message simply vanished. The failure was only visible by digging into the run diagnostics; anyone watching the chat or the job's status saw a healthy run.
A developer's project sat inside a OneDrive folder. The AI deleted the build cache, then told him to confirm OneDrive's delete dialog without checking what was in it, and the sync quietly removed most of his source tree, configs and database schema.
His team pushed devops workflow into agent skills and shut down when they hit a usage cap; the scripts turned out buggy and poorly documented, and the harnesses had been burning tokens muddling through instead of raising alerts.
He let GPT-6 Astra work on a few simple features. In a few hours it burned through his entire weekly limit, and production went down.
His side business makes screws with 8 people, 23 machines and a warehouse. Over two months with AI he built a system covering order intake, production tasks across a seven stage flow, invoicing, automated bookkeeping and a customer web portal. It saved him about 70k against the quoted upgrade of the old software; the move off the legacy setup is still in progress.
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.