57 billion tokens spent rewriting a small tool, and nothing usable came out
57B tokens burned on an AI jq rewrite and nothing usable came out.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
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 · 970 ideasTrade Polymarket for a week with no intervention from me
A trading creator let an AI run six strategies on Polymarket for a week — about 500 trades on $260 — and reported a headline 1,560% ROI, while also admitting the paper-trading stats were corrupted by a bug that showed $6.2 million in profit from $30 by ignoring fees and slippage. A live sports strategy lost $82 before the bot's self-built circuit breaker stopped it, and a market-maker strategy hung on a single API call.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI swore my two Stripe accounts would stay separate. They linked, and it cannot be undone
While setting up Stripe subscriptions, a user asked the AI again and again to check whether reusing one account's identity on a second account would keep their business details separate. The AI said yes with confidence and never checked. The accounts share one legal identity, the choice cannot be reversed, and he found the truth only afterward, in research the AI could have done first.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
He made his own workout app with AI and dropped the paid one
A man made a workout app with AI that he uses instead of the paid app he had before, which he says saves him $100 a month, and he likes his own better. One sound bug in it is still unsolved despite his and the AI’s efforts.
$100a month
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Built a recipe-organizing app from his saved Instagram posts in 5 minutes
After a friend used AI on Instagram favorites, Thompson asked it to organize his saved Instagram recipes. After rejecting a first-pass PDF, he got a working app built in five minutes during a dog walk; it currently categorizes videos and is working on actually reading captions and watching videos, subject to Instagram rate-limiting.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
His weekly activity sheet pipeline sent out an unchecked issue and lost 9 subscribers in 9 days
He sells a weekly activity sheet for parents of young children, 62 subscribers at $8.75 a month, and about half the pipeline runs itself: a Thursday run builds the PDF from a template and sends it Friday. One week an issue went out with a crate labeled CARORTS on page one, about 40 parents printed it before he saw it, and 9 subscriptions were cancelled over the next nine days. He now holds every issue for his own read through before it sends.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
Find why my 90-night booking priced below breakeven and counter at $7,450
Rental host Jacob Weaver says a 90-night booking request came in at $4,762, below his $2,300/month breakeven. Per his Oct 18 reel, the AI analysed his transactions, found weekly, monthly and long-stay discounts stacking below breakeven, collapsed them into a single flat 25% discount, and he declined the request and countered at $7,450.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI treated my question as a yes and wiped my USB drive
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.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
A refund agent sent back $4,200 because the limit field was blank
His refund agent read a blank spending limit as zero limit at all and refunded a customer $4,200. It took three days of reversal calls to undo.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
Built a web page in ~40 seconds that she would not use
Web page build scored 5/10: built in ~40 seconds but read like a first-pass concept, noticeably less developed than the AI’s output for the same job — and the finished file was hard to locate (hunting through Goals and Files).
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
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.