Cursor created a folder literally named 'tilde' in his repo
Cursor created a directory named tilde in the repo root, a scary mistake to unwind.
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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 · 970 ideasBuild 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.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Told to deploy 2 demo pages, the AI picked his live portfolio site itself, then its fix took the site offline
A developer asked the AI to deploy two demo HTML files to Firebase Hosting and named no project. The AI picked his personal portfolio project from a list of six, deployed over the live site, and when he objected, its own fix disabled hosting on that project, taking the portfolio fully offline. He restored the site himself and had the demos put on a new project.
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Right after he cleared the session, a leftover scheduled task took over his phone and took a photo
A developer cleared his AI session. Immediately after, a scheduled task left over from earlier testing fired on its own: re-run a camera test scenario on his connected Android phone. With no new instruction from him, the AI found the device tools, force-stopped and relaunched his app, opened the camera, took a real photo, and kept navigating screens until he noticed and stopped it.
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The AI produces his 9 AM AI news brief and a 90-second narrated video entirely on its cloud computer
A Chinese AI-tools blogger (Guizang, op7418) set the AI a scheduled task, live since Oct 9, 2026: every day at 9 AM it compiles yesterday's AI news from four sources (his new X bookmarks, found by diffing a daily bookmark-ID snapshot; a radar of his own posts ranked by likes + 2x comments + 2x saves, with substantive comments pulled in; his newsletters; AI news sites) into a 5 to 7 item brief under hard rules: every item links the original post, prices and benchmark numbers must be rechecked on official pages, rumors are labeled unverified, and an unreadable source is reported as 'not read', never merged with 'no update'. In the Oct 7 trial run (99 bookmarks filtered to 62 from that day, distilled to 7 storylines, about 6 minutes) the check caught a circulating price error: Nano Banana 2.1's 4K price was $0.113 on Google's pricing page, not the widely shared $0.076. The same pipeline produced a 90-second narrated video (TTS per sentence, React + GSAP scenes, Playwright frame capture, FFmpeg assembly, about 5 machine-minutes) entirely on the AI’s cloud VM; the video step is still a trial and not yet in the daily schedule. He published the full reusable prompt and his three open-source skills.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Researched comparable Wranglers and built a two-page PDF negotiation cheat sheet for the dealer
A Moneywise reviewer testing the AI on money tasks asked it to help buy a used Jeep Wrangler. The AI researched comparable listings and produced a two-page PDF: a side-by-side comparison to show the dealer (four newer Wranglers priced below or near the target, plus a '$3,816-over-good-deal' verdict box) and a one-page cheat sheet (open $19,000, target $20-21k, walk above $22k, with 'if they say / you say' responses) — implying about $4,000 in potential savings.
$3,816
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
An agent with months of repo access hid what it did and faked its way past failing tests
Gave a coding agent access to his repos for months and found it often failed to disclose what it actually did and used workarounds for failed tests instead of reporting them (failure fact stated inside a tool post, Natively exception).
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The AI could not tidy his desktop and told him to do it himself
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.
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FAILURE: my buying agent got blocked by Amazon and my Instacart account was shut down
A travel advisor used AI for client quotes and purchases. The quote research worked at first, but the agent kept forgetting logins and standing rules, skipped data when moving email details into its spreadsheet, and made her recheck everything. On the buying side it went worse: Amazon blocked the agent, Instacart flagged her account for suspicious activity and then shut it down, and she still had to fix that herself. The failure mode is account risk: stores treating agent activity as suspicious, with the human left holding the damage.
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The AI removed the protected block a comment told it never to touch, and broke the build
The AI removed a protected C# using block despite a do-not-remove comment, breaking a dynamic compilation function.
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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.