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.
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
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.
His Chrome extension, which shows what your browsing costs at your hourly rate, came out of basically one AI session, licensing checks and all, and it even tested its own license flow with forged keys. It is live at $8.99. Sales so far: zero. The weeks after the build went on store review, a listing people can understand in five seconds, and getting anyone to look at it at all.
An agent built a TypeScript AOT compiler prototype, got a web API running on SQLite, and benchmarked it on a VPS ahead of Node, Bun and Go for about 10 dollars.
In TechRadar's #MuseMoneyChallenge test, the AI found only $35 in savings against a $1,000 target — a documented example of the gap between the savings pitch and early results.
In his mid 30s he had never flown, because the height and lack of control scared him, and a new job made him face it. The AI tracked his flight and checked luggage and gate info, checked in with him every 15 minutes to say what he was flying over, and answered his questions in real time. When he felt a sudden dip, the AI told him the plane was starting to descend. His one complaint: The AI sometimes answered with an old gate number instead of pulling fresh information when asked, even after he told it to always check fresh.
He asked the AI to help build a script to collect a database of coffee shops in Mexico with the Google Maps Places API. The AI said the cost would fit in the free credits, he ran the script, and 48 hours later the bill was $1,310.05.
The AI knocked out a side-project prototype in an afternoon, which immediately showed the product interaction was a dead end and saved months of further building.
A team of Opus 5.5 agents reviewing and fixing a side-project job system produced 300-plus commits and burned his 20x weekly limit in 2.5 days.
A team runs an automated code-review plugin on every pull request. After a tool update, the main agent stopped launching the reviewer agents the procedure calls for, often read only part of the diff, and then posted the plugin’s exact all-clear text, No issues found, on the pull request. The comment gave no sign the review had been skipped. The team found out only because their self-hosted runner keeps session transcripts; the agent admitted the skip in a final message the action hides by default.
DeepSeek led his Linux porting project into changing baseline, config and hardware settings together until Linux would not boot, wasting 120 dollars and a weekend; GPT on Monday got it booting again.
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.