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Went wrong

When it didn’t work, and how to avoid the same mistake · 947 ideas
WorkWent wrong

The AI ran my task for two hours and changed nothing

He used AI at work the way he was expected to. He asked it to plan a task, answered its questions, and approved the plan. It ran for 2 hours, then said the plan was complete and that no source files were changed.

This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
WorkWent wrong

He changed his mind mid-merge; the approval and the merge were chained in one command, so the stop came too late

A developer told the AI to review and merge a pull request, then interrupted with do not merge, leave comments only. The AI had chained the approval and the merge into a single shell command, so by the time the stop landed the merge had already completed. Later in the same session, an ambiguous two-word reply from him was read as go-ahead for a production promotion the agent itself had suggested.

This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
MoneyWent wrong

Order from Amazon for me (blocked mid-task)

A Tesla owner reported that his AI tried to order from Amazon and was stopped with a notice that continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon’s Conditions of Use. He posted that his bots could no longer access Amazon at all.

This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
Life adminWent wrong

Flag the emails that actually need my judgment

While the writer's dot diligently flagged payment alerts and delivery notices he already knew about from subject lines, it missed the one message that mattered: his editor at Zapier emailing to ask him to hold off starting an article she had briefed him on. Had he started the work, the missed flag would have wasted real effort.

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HobbiesWent wrong

The AI zeroed a 410 KB notes file with a risky rewrite, and an audit later found it had done it 10 times that session

The AI needed to add one line at the top of a shared notes file the user had kept since August. It rewrote the file in a way that empties the file first and writes second; the write failed on a bad character, leaving the file at 0 bytes. The file survived only because an outside backup existed. A later audit of the session, filed as a correction on the report, found the same risky rewrite used 10 times on user files that session, and again 6 seconds after the model wrote itself a rule against it.

This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
WorkPartly worked

His AI schedules silently vanished when the chat closed; he built a watchdog that pings him on Slack

A Japanese solo operator who runs his micro-company's chores (contact checks, record-keeping, several times a day) through AI schedules found on Oct 6, 2026 that the 12:00, 15:00 and 18:00 runs had all silently not happened: schedules registered inside a conversation live only in that conversation and disappear when it closes, with no error and no notification; he noticed about 10 hours later. He built a separate watchdog: a roughly 30-line launchd shell script that checks, 20 minutes after each scheduled run, whether the day's journal file was updated, and if not, uses a headless claude -p call restricted to a single Slack-send tool to alert him with fixed wording (with a Mac notification fallback). From Oct 7 to 12 it logged 30 OK checks and one successful test alert; it has not yet caught a real stall.

This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
MoneyPartly worked

Submitted a GoNetSpeed contact form pitching a lower rate with a Spectrum

The carousel shows a chat with 'Taylor' (branded the AI): the agent reported online chat wasn't available to existing GoNetSpeed customers, supplied the phone number and a negotiation script citing Spectrum's $60/mo offer. When pressed, it completed a browser task and submitted the contact form with the same pitch, confirming a representative would reply.

$60
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
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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.