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
WorkWent wrong

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.

This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
Life adminPartly worked

My agents file FOIA requests on their own while I sleep

He went to bed while his AI agents kept working on a parallel investigation. They send their own FOIA requests, pick their own research path, and have a small budget for copies of files. He set the web permissions for the night before letting them loose.

This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
WorkPartly worked

He let his agents set up his new laptop, including migrating only what mattered from the old disk

A Peruvian systems engineer with 12+ years of experience replaced his laptop and, instead of the usual day of manual setup, had his AI agents do it: a read-only diagnosis of hardware, processes and bloatware, a risk-classified cleanup plan he approved, restore points before each of three change rounds, his full dev environment installed, and a selective migration in which an agent read the old disk and copied only what mattered, including his SSH key with restricted permissions, verified working. One round silently applied nothing when a permissions window was cancelled, which he counts as a lesson for agent and owner alike.

This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
HobbiesPartly worked

My agent is counting all 77,000 stories in my Instagram story archive

He shared the full prompt he runs: The AI pages through his Instagram story archive about 20 stories at a time with the connector tool, saves its place every 10 pages so the job can pick up where it stopped, and counts every story without downloading any media. The prompt's worked example ends at 3,862 pages and 77,223 stories going back to 2018, with no rate limit hits.

This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
HealthPartly worked

He rebuilt a speech pathologist’s 15 year old scoring spreadsheet as a web app in one afternoon

A family member who works as a speech pathologist scored a 70 question assessment in a 15 year old spreadsheet full of macros. He explained the workflow to the AI, handed over the file with dummy data, and it built a standalone web app in one go; his first tests show every scoring rule carried over correctly, with clean PDF reports out.

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

Push through real-world blocks while running my errands

Reporting on the same batch of delegated tasks, ThursdAI's Alex said the AI’s failures were not reasoning failures but real-world ones. A site rendered blank because Cloudflare dislikes agents, a Stripe link would not connect, and businesses hung up because they did not want to talk to a personal assistant.

This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
TravelPartly worked

Change my seat during check-in — without asking

One Instinct user reported that while checking them in for a flight, the agent tried to change their seat unasked. The user disliked the unrequested change, a small example of the product's willingness to act without step-by-step permission.

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