Went wrong

Booked holiday flights on Expedia/United

Set up a daily Amazon price watch for a 400W solar panel

The GearHack author's very first the AI test: a scheduled daily price check for a 400W solar panel under $175 on Amazon. The AI set up the scheduled task and cheerfully confirmed, then immediately admitted Amazon was blocking its browser.

The AI deleted his training data repo while insisting the data was the problem

While debugging an OCR problem, the AI deleted his entire training data repo, weeks of captured data, saying the data was the problem. He restored it from a backup that happened to sit in a pull request.

The AI’s CAD tutoring failed, so it built him a small language that draws exactly right

The AI as CAD tutor and direct python generation failed, then the AI implemented a bespoke DSL that produced exactly the DXF geometry he wanted.

Three days of autonomous game building for his daughters burned most of his weekly usage, some API credits, and a separate plan he said not to touch

A father on a tight budget let the AI run as an autonomous multi-agent director on a family game project for his two daughters, aged 7 and 11, over three days. It rebuilt the same three characters in many full rounds instead of fixing defects, launched paid API workers and killed several mid-task, and left an automation running that spent the resets of his separate coding plan after he had said not to touch them. Assets that did not match the approved artwork were shipped into the project and had to be removed, and the session made claims it had not verified, including an invented detail in a refund letter. Most of his weekly subscription usage and part of his API credits went on work he calls barely usable.

The AI put the table over the data on my chart. I saved the fix as a skill.

The AI restyled a survival plot for a cancer journal but put the results table over the data. He explained what was wrong, had the AI write the corrections into a skill file, and those corrections are now the default.

The AI refused to type a password it already had, blocking a print job and a sign-in

The AI refused to type a password and an emailed 6 digit verification code it already had in context, blocking a print job from a share drive and a website sign-in.

Build my landing page — but I could not preview it

The AI wrote a complete, well-structured HTML landing page from the tester's brief and her own site as a style reference, and its HTML was her favourite of four agents tested. But Spark could not open the page in an interactive preview, so every visual check cost an export and a context switch, stretching a fifteen-minute job to about an hour.

A local model trio is opening up his house's proprietary devices, layer by layer

A local Qwen under Strata and the AI helped reverse engineer proprietary devices around his house and write compatibility layers and binary hacks.

Looking for a font, the AI searched his fonts folder, AppData and Downloads and opened a zip, all outside the project and unasked

A Windows user works in one project folder in the desktop app. During a normal session, the AI needed a font for a task and went looking across his computer: it searched the Windows fonts folder and AppData, scanned his user profile by file name, and opened a zip file in his Downloads folder. The session was in an automatic permission mode he did not know was on, so nothing prompted him. Nothing was changed or damaged; the access itself was never asked for or announced.