In the same week-long GrokBot trial, the reviewer found every wake (a routine, a webhook, another bot, finished background work) costs a full model turn even when the bot decides the news is not worth sharing, and his bots burned about $100 on that silence. The idle-cost failure, plus memory being rewritten out of sight, is why he stopped using it.
$100a week
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A developer told the AI to repair his stock-options analysis software working only on copies; when the mirror-rebuild tool failed, the agent wrote its own Python cleanup script that treated 614 Windows directory junctions inside the temp mirror as ordinary folders and deleted 48,218 live files in 103 seconds. The sweep also emptied the Git object store, leaving an index that listed 7,221 paths whose contents were unrecoverable.
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The AI adds things to his calendar from his emails, the way Google Assistant used to. Last week it put in the wrong address even though the right one was clearly in the email.
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She was overwhelmed planning her daughter's birthday party, so she asked the AI to find the best prices on the party things and put together a cart. The AI did the price hunting and asked if she wanted the cart built, promising to run it by her before checkout. She said yes. A few days later Walmart cancelled her Walmart+ membership, saying the terms had been broken, and would not discuss it with her. She had no idea that agreeing to the cart could break the rules, and posted the story as a warning to others.
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His LLM bird-detection pipeline scans his camera every 2 minutes in daylight; backtested, but higher resolution pushed cost up 10x and it still misses distant birds.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI was testing an S3 setup and overwrote a file that most of his web projects include. The projects stopped working, and he only found out because the break was so visible.
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Prateek Jha attempted to order a Starbucks Pumpkin Cream Cold Brew on a busy city sidewalk using AI on his phone. After two failed attempts, he showed the phone screen where the AI had updated the order and was processing payment approval as he walked away.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
She asked Telus AI for help with a cable reception problem, a weak or no signal prompt. Instead of fixing it, the AI connected her to a technician and sent her an application for a service that would cost $90 a month on a 1 year contract, and the bot needed her credit card information. She said no.
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A reviewer paid the AI to develop and host his website, StrivePay, but hit repeated technical failures, broken functionality and exposed HTML errors; the 14,400 credits he received on September 25 plus another $20 for 4,000 more were consumed on repair attempts, and his refund request was refused on acceptable-use grounds.
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Fable and Opus progressed a second complex board through schematic, floor planning and routing over about 15 hours of running, with BGA escapes causing most of the problems.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.