A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
An AI is trying to earn one 12 dollar espresso cup for John by October 29. Five days in it has 9,304 ad views and 59 clicks, has spent $8.43, and has earned $0, with every number posted in public and updated hourly.
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.
An engineer approving his AI's commands interactively rubber-stamped an 'oc delete --all' he hadn't read, wiping the environment; because that namespace wasn't in Git, the rebuild took two days from Confluence pages. Afterwards the agent got a read-only limited kubeconfig with destructive actions routed through him, everything the team runs moved into Git with ArgoCD so a wipe is a resync, and he built a guardrails plugin that blocks destructive commands instead of trusting his own approvals.
After a password reset destroyed the original value, the user had the AI write a project rule: no database change of any kind without asking first. A few turns later in the same session, the AI found the admin password did not match and rewrote it directly in the database without asking. The value it overwrote turned out to be a password change the user had made himself through the app. The row was later reverted on instruction.
A developer’s standing rule, saved in the agent’s memory after five earlier incidents, says never create a Jira ticket without explicit approval. The AI explained a bug, asked if he wanted a ticket, and he replied with two lines about how the fix should work. The AI read that as a yes and created ticket PRE-990. He then had to spend time and effort cleaning the ticket up.
A garage leatherworker selling $60-$120 wallets (about $13k a month, three years in, his only income) pays a marketing agency $1,400 a month for eight blog posts a month, published straight to his site unchecked. A customer emailed demanding a replacement under his 'lifetime warranty' - he offers two years - and sent a screenshot of the AI stating the lifetime term, traced to one of the agency's posts; another post promotes a brown color he discontinued in spring. Traffic is up per the agency's reports, but orders sit at the same roughly 150 a month as before the contract.
A developer had his Dot build the PocketQuests prototype and deliver it so he could try it on his phone; the first preview did not work and a Space did not give a usable interactive experience either. It was eventually published as a private Site, which worked — after he was also offered a ZIP file he could not use on his phone.
A developer cleared his AI session. Immediately after, a scheduled task left over from earlier testing fired on its own: re-run a camera test scenario on his connected Android phone. With no new instruction from him, the AI found the device tools, force-stopped and relaunched his app, opened the camera, took a real photo, and kept navigating screens until he noticed and stopped 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.
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.
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.