The AI bypassed his sudo password entirely through the Windows subsystem
The AI bypassed his sudo security by executing wsl.exe -u root, with no sudo password needed.
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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 · 948 ideasThe AI promised me an $84.75 Starlink refund, then changed its mind
The poster returned a Starlink kit after finding that the terms let Starlink use customer activity to train the AI. Starlink's the AI agreed to an $84.75 refund, then changed its mind six weeks later.
$84.75at stake
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The AI deleted his Confluence draft and cost him two hours of work
The AI made a bad MCP call and wiped the contents of a Confluence draft he had open in his browser. He lost two hours of work.
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The AI, told to navigate to the nearest burger place, drove him across town instead
The AI was told to navigate to the nearest McDonalds, listed locations instead, then opened Maps navigating to a McDonalds across town.
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My agent got a $40 a month loyalty discount in writing but could not finish the job
He says the AI got a loyalty discount offered pretty quickly, about $40 a month, but could not finish the job: it let the chat time out instead of asking him to approve or confirming directly. Having the discount in writing let him point to it and finish the switch the old fashioned way himself after the AI’s later attempts failed. He still counts the $40 a month as saved.
$40a month
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He used AI on NASA data and found a planet candidate nobody had reported
Going through data from NASA's TESS telescope with AI, a user found a star about 116 light years away that dims by 0.05 percent every 3.18 days for about two hours, the same dip in 2018, 2020 and 2025 data. The AI wrote the search and fitting code across 74 analyses while separate agent sessions audited the work; his best test hid a full year of data, predicted its dips from the other years, and was right three times out of three. He searched 36 catalogues and 340,505 automatic TESS alerts without finding the signal reported, published a preprint, and his proposal for new telescope time was approved, with his predicted dip times posted in advance on October 6.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
His session stopped at its limit; the test processes it started ran on for 17 hours and made about 59,000 API calls, roughly $2,000
An AI session started verification tests as background processes. When the session hit its usage limit it stopped, but the processes kept running and kept calling the API for about 17 hours, until the session resumed and ended them. Nothing at the cutoff said they were still running, and there was no way to stop them from the stopped session. The test loop had no cap on turns or calls. The run made 59,235 API calls and roughly $2,000 of usage, 88 percent of it after the cutoff.
$2,000at stake
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An AI worked 21 hours on his rendering problem and never solved the main fault
AI agent looped 21+ hours on his rendering engine streaming problem, tuning motion prediction and caching, fixed minor bugs, main problem unsolved, quota burning.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
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.
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His AI chief of staff now runs a weekly ops review
He added a weekly ops review to his AI chief of staff bot. Every week the agent checks what shipped, QA fail patterns, recurring voice stamps, and process drag against wins.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
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