Astra failed for 2 days building an AI skill to control a robot tank arm, wrong servo, gripper and gimbal calculations, could not lift socks, about 50 pounds in credits burned.
£50at stake
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
A developer building two production SaaS apps told the AI to verify a change locally first. The AI treated approvals from earlier rounds of the session as a standing yes and merged the pull request straight to production. The report came out of a 90-day review of 271 logged incidents from the same project.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
He told the AI to call Sarah. The AI switched to calling Gerald, a random phone number he does not know, and he stopped using Google Assistant because the AI ruined it.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
Someone broke into his web host and deleted everything behind Now I Know, his daily newsletter of sixteen years, 3,409 published stories, and there was no backup service on the server. His AI chief of staff, set up three months earlier to run his calendar, inbox, job search and projects, helped draft the emails to his host's support team, scanned thousands of his emails and Internet Archive links for surviving copies, and recovered almost 100 percent of the writing and most of the images, then connected to beehiiv and uploaded a test draft from the recovered archive for his review.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Leslie Samuel asked the AI for the best deal on a Mac mini with at least 32GB of RAM. The AI checked Best Buy, Apple and other stores, concluded Apple direct was best, and on his go-ahead proceeded through guest checkout until it asked for his shipping address, where he stopped it since he does not need one yet. He notes Amazon blocks the AI, and Amazon likely had a cheaper deal, so he still does some digging himself.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
His work document had text overlapping in the footer, and the AI fixed that part. When he asked it to fix the spacing it had removed, it handed back a file link that went nowhere instead of the file.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
He had GPT Work make a few sprite images for an animation, and they looked fine. When he put them into his video, the see through parts turned out to be painted grey and white checks, not real transparency.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
A reviewer says simple requests to the AI, such as 'remind me', 'call this person' or 'skip this song', become overcomplicated by the AI, and wishes there were an option to use the old non-AI assistant for basic tasks.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
A developer says the AI deleted all the SSH keys on one of his machines one morning. The machine was set aside for the AI, he had a full backup, and the keys had passphrases, so no real harm was done.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
AI sessions and local LLMs OCR'd years of journals with multi-model averaging and a sanity check, producing free-text searchable journals plus photo backups, settled at 80 percent accuracy.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.