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 · 948 ideas
HealthPartly worked

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.
HobbiesWent wrong

My Raspberry Pi the AI desk buddy never even got on Wi-Fi

The same builder tried the other half of Meta's kit, a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W that was meant to become a battery powered voice announcer. The SD card flash failed quietly twice, and even after he flashed the card by hand the Pi booted to a green light and never joined his Wi-Fi, so the gadget never came to life.

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

Browse for me by voice — cloud computer died after a reset

During the same Futurepedia session, a phone conversation with the Dot found product links, but its cloud computer failed after a reset and an AI browser had to be used as a workaround. The scheduled-task tab also would not open during the recording.

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

I let Astra run a software factory for 35 hours. It built nothing of value.

Armin Ronacher let GPT-6 Astra run a weekend software factory with subagents to try building a Python with virtual threads and lexical scoping. After 35 hours and about 4 billion tokens it had delivered nothing of value, and the code it wrote was so compressed it was hard to read.

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

A test the AI wrote for filesystem code wiped his home directory and a second drive, in auto mode

The agent was working on his project in auto mode. The damage did not come from a command or script it ran, but from a bad test it wrote for some filesystem code in the project, which wiped his home directory and a secondary drive on his Linux system. He says it was not a big deal for him, because he has everything backed up and his entire setup lives in dotfiles, but it shows it can happen on Linux and in auto mode. He retold the same event in another thread ten days later; it is one case.

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

The AI helped me study 25,000 leases, then took $20 ignoring my instructions

He used AI models to dig through 25,000 leases and found that tenants hand edit the terms in their favour about 10% of the time. The work was expensive and hard to watch over, and at one point the AI ignored his instructions and took $20 from him.

$20
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
HobbiesWent wrong

Organize my Downloads folder

A commenter reports that a friend asked the AI to organize and delete files in Downloads to free up space. It deleted important files that had no other copies.

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

My Dot could not publish my article to three sites this time

Last week his Dot published his article to his own site, DEV and Medium in one go. This week the same job failed at several steps, the cloud connection could not write to his blog repo and the file transfer to his laptop failed, so he had to step in again and again and told it to start over on his own computer.

This one went wrong. See what happened 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.