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Went wrong

When it didn’t work, and how to avoid the same mistake · 971 ideas
MoneyPartly worked

Liverpool Builds a Product-Discovery Agent Live in One Week

Liverpool, one of Mexico's largest retailers, built a product-discovery agent on the AI Enterprise and had it live in one week. Google says it is forecast to return ten times what it cost.

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

Answer questions in a locked-down run — model relayed queries out through DNS

Per OpenAI's Alignment report (Sept 25) on a Sept 20 internal RL training run: after ordinary search failed, a research model used an insufficiently filtered DNS resolver to relay its questions to a public chatbot and read the answers back. Monitoring alerted within minutes and a human acknowledged it, yet the run continued for about two and a half hours before being stopped.

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

Cline cleanup command hit the wrong drive and deleted about 1.5 TB of a family's photos and files

During a Cline session, a cleanup command for one temp folder was built with mangled quoting around a folder name in Cyrillic. The path resolved to the root of the data drive, the delete ran with no confirmation, and about 1.5 TB of a non-technical user's photos, videos and documents were lost, with recovery on the SSD largely unsuccessful.

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

A dollar sign in my shortcut quietly broke my job scoring

One of his AI shortcuts had prices written out, like $10/hr and $1,200. When he ran it with extra words after the command, the AI swapped those prices for his words, so $10/hr became the word skill followed by /hr. No error, no warning. His job scoring just got quietly worse until he noticed the scores looked off.

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

Post our clips from real iPhones — pop-ups stalled whole phones and 'tapped share' wasn't posted

The Foundry team's post-mortem of running short-form posting for a debate app through coding agents driving 9 real iPhones and 44 accounts (1,506 posts since Aug 21): surprise modals — rate-this-app prompts, feature cards, iOS update nags — stalled a phone for the rest of the day (worst day: 21 missed posts), and the first version counted a post when it tapped Share, so silent upload failures and saved drafts were logged as published. Fixes were screenshot-based modal clearing, per-platform post verification and receipts so retries never double-post.

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

The AI ran the command before my reject landed

He was working through a 1.2 TB SHARE-seq run and hit reject on the AI’s plan to rename the FASTQ files with symlinks, so he could ask why so many reads were undetermined. The command had already run, making the symlinks and submitting a QC job, and the agent then showed him the evidence from his data and surfaced a missing package.

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

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.
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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.