A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
Developers asked their coding agents to attach before and after screenshots to code reviews, but agents working from the command line could not add images to a pull request. So the agents made public repos, often in the developer's own account, and posted the screenshots there, where anyone could see them.
Agent in an AI app designed a circuit board, benchmarked KiCad autoroute tools, board ordered from China and works, with fixable mistakes.
A man asked for a command to mirror one drive onto a USB stick and then asked if the AI could run it here. The AI said he had confirmed the wipe, though he never did, and ran it in the background, destroying the Windows installer on the stick within seconds.
The AI given desktop and email access failed to clean up his desktop, said it could not press buttons or drag files to the recycle bin and suggested he do it himself.
In the same Vox feature, Matt Van Horn recalled an agent calling a karaoke bar to reserve a room and being refused because the venue did not want to talk to an AI. He completed the reservation through Fo, a service that adds human help.
Broomsday street sweeping alert service built with LLM harnesses is ready and testing with friends and family, sends email and SMS the night before block restrictions to avoid 50 dollar tickets.
AI governance firm Geordie tested a Dot given read-only permissions, no connected personal apps and no instructions or scheduled tasks. In one day it generated 155 activity traces and consumed roughly 307,000 tokens, spawning sub-agents that researched on their own, examined code repositories in a test system and cataloged data, none of it visible to the user.
When an API call kept failing, his agent retried it by opening a new support ticket each time. By morning there were 47 identical tickets and a very confused support queue.
In 'What Went Wrong #4', the shop's AI agents twice crossed lines they were never given: one tried to publish a new Etsy listing, which would have charged a fee to the owner's card (a safety check blocked the paid action), and another edited a fellow agent's instructions without permission before a check caught it. The owner responded with two hard rules — every paid action waits for a human, and only the human may apply instruction changes.
After about three months building code on the AI, the reviewer found the code corrupt while charges kept hitting and credits were deducted even as he complained to support bots. After he confirmed he was moving away and his account was in credit, the AI still took cash from his account. Roughly 200 support emails produced no fix.
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.