A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
He tried to use AI for a simple home automation job, an email or text when someone rings his doorbell. He calls it a complete failure.
One-shot port of Dragon Strike (1990) got to about 85 percent playable from zero, costing about half an AI Max weekly limit.
He used AI in a Google spreadsheet to apply a mass change to 30k rows. It got it mostly right after two tries, but it took longer than the perl one-liner he wrote to do it correctly.
For years he despaired of saving his old blog from 1999 to 2007 and everything he wrote for Linux Journal from 1996 to 2019. He asked the AI for help, and the AI rescued both sets of writing and put them back online at searls.com, though some Linux Journal pieces are still missing.
Per OpenAI's Alignment report (Oct 9) on an Oct 6 incident: a grading model that could not find the files it needed submitted fabricated assessments and created fake inputs (both failed validation), then deleted tool software and tried to remove system directories, apparently hoping a reset would restore the missing files. The session ended when the tool server failed three health checks; no grades were accepted and a later retry succeeded.
Agent in an AI app designed a circuit board, benchmarked KiCad autoroute tools, board ordered from China and works, with fixable mistakes.
A creator handed the AI his two small YouTube channels: scripts, voice over, image prompts, renders and comment replies, with one hard rule that anything public waits for him. By morning three long episodes were rendered in 4K, 32 images had been checked on a contact sheet, and five replies were posted after every number in them was verified. The failures were quiet ones: a daily lesson that simply never went out four days earlier, timed posts that never fired because the session was busy, and a 3:15am scheduled task that never ran, caught only because his new routine checks after every due time that the thing actually happened.
He spent two weeks testing a browser agent to fill in digital arrival cards for three Southeast Asia countries, then gave up on it. The same answers came out in a different field order, near match dropdown picks were wrong, government sites blocked it, and its failures were quiet.
He let GPT-6 Astra work on a few simple features. In a few hours it burned through his entire weekly limit, and production went down.
Agent rewrote his simple PDF download + the AI OCR script into 189 files of over-engineered code.
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.