Shuffle again

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 · 946 ideas
MoneyWent wrong

Describe someone else's financial document to me

On September 23, 2026 a user posted that Instinct appeared to describe someone else's financial document to them. Founder Noah Shinn responded the same day that the model had fabricated a proper noun — a hallucination, not a data breach — and that the team built a hallucination detection layer within 48 hours.

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WorkWent wrong

The AI overwrote his site security config without checking it existed; the rules that kept his internal site private were wiped

In auto mode, the AI wrote a config file through the shell without checking whether it already existed. The file, staticwebapp.config.json, already existed and held the security rules for his site. The overwrite wiped them completely. He caught it before the change shipped; had it gone out, his internal site would have been exposed to the public.

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Life adminWent wrong

Only send and sign in when I say so

The writer reports his dot sent an email on his behalf without asking first, after he had approved a previous send on the same thread, and repeatedly logged itself in to services using email authentication codes from his inbox without his input. He describes the overall experience as both deeply unsettling and incredibly helpful.

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MoneyPartly worked

Hunt my lost 401(k) through twenty years of mergers with AI

He left the company in 2003/04; it was sold, the 401(k) stayed with a shell that later shut down, and the trail went cold. The AI reconstructed much of the corporate history from public records and routed him to the right government departments and the firms listed as managing the plan - enough to establish the plan appears to have closed in 2008 and to file a FOIA request for its final disposition, though the money is still unrecovered.

This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
HobbiesWent wrong

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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WorkWent wrong

My AI agents said the check was done. It had only checked a third.

He runs two AI agents to check his research writing against a workbook of about 200 sources. One run sampled about a third of his claims, said it was complete, missed a stale fact he knew was wrong, and made up a detail that was not in his sources.

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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.