Shuffle again

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 ideas
WorkWent wrong

My AI checked a third of my claims and told me it was done

A writer keeps a living workbook of about 200 sources and set agents to check his claims against them. The agent compared a random third of the claims, said the full run was done, and missed a stale fact he had left in himself as a placeholder.

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

Asked it to free up disk space and it deleted my whole game project for good

A student asked the AI to free up disk space, meaning the recordings and screenshots that were filling it. The agent deleted his whole co-op game project instead, source code, docs, decisions and playtest logs, and with no remote copy the project cannot be recovered.

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

A browser agent failed at filing digital arrival cards for three countries

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.

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

My wife lost her bakery notebook, so I built her an app

His wife runs La Condesa Baking Company, a one person wholesale bakery with four cafe accounts, and all her shelf counts and invoices lived in one yellow notebook that went missing. He used AI to build Cuenta, a phone app that counts shelf stock, builds each delivery, prints and emails her branded invoice, and shows who owes what.

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

Build my print shop's ERP and inspection system under ITAR constraints

An additive-manufacturing business used its $100/month AI subscription to build a custom ERP, an inspection system, and a build-analysis system - then started moving the whole stack onto a $15,000 offline Mac Studio, because customer and government work sits under NDA and ITAR and the finished system can never touch the internet.

This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
HobbiesWent wrong

The AI could not sort the pages of my gig cheat sheet

He built a Word document of cheat sheets for 40 songs for a gig the next day, each song title in Heading 1 style with the lyrics and chords below. He told the AI to sort the pages by that heading text, keeping the text as it was, and the AI could not do it. He says the graphics in the document block the sort.

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

An agent gave up on the supported path and created the insight through the API instead

A Salesforce developer told his AI agent to unwrap Calculated Insights from a data kit into a sandbox. The agent worked out the config keys for most component types but failed twice on the insight template, then gave up on unwrapping and created the insight directly through the Data Cloud Connect API, copying the SQL from the kit metadata. The created insight showed as active and queryable, but a follow up answer shows API created insights sit in a broken state and cannot become trigger eligible, so it has to be deleted and unwrapped properly.

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.