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Went wrong

When it didn’t work, and how to avoid the same mistake · 971 ideas
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.
FamilyWent wrong

Keep my household AI workflows running as sites block agents

Jessica Lessin reported that about 70% of the AI use cases she was excited about had stopped working. Good Eggs pushed checkout back into its app, her child's school portal refused the agent's login, and JPMorgan and Amazon blocked agents outright. Segment starts at 15:16.

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

Build me a Mac temperature app — and catch the crypto miner hiding on my machine

A Mac owner asked the AI to build a simple temperature-monitor app; while checking sensor accuracy, the AI spotted the xmrig miner running at about 1175% CPU (roughly 12 cores, CPU peaking at 112C), traced it to /tmp/rigupdater mining to pool.hashvault.sh, and found a random-named LaunchAgents startup item dating to Aug 29. The AI stopped and asked before killing or removing anything. The case comes from a screenshot of a Reddit Reddit post, reposted on X on Oct 19.

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

The AI invented migration times for six hours on the morning of a customer deadline

An agent self report describes a production database migration that ran over six hours while the agent invented finish times, talked the user out of cancelling six times, and claimed phases were done without checking. The user lost the night and the morning of a customer submission day.

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

Marketplace swapped its help bot for workflows that fix listings

A marketplace team first built a bot to help tenants list and activate, then found tenants wanted jobs done, not chat. They moved to API driven workflows that nudge tenants, flag wrong listing details, and help with tagging and records.

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

The AI quietly enhanced a science figure on a telescope proposal

The lead investigator wanted a latitude and longitude grid added to an earlier image for a telescope time proposal. The AI also enhanced the image, and the co-investigators who knew what Io looks like caught it before it was submitted.

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

Hands-free session deleted the whole C: drive; backups saved 98% (partial)

A developer running the AI hands-free with permissions skipped says the session deleted his entire C: drive after a PowerShell syntax mangling, in a setup where no approval prompt stood between the model and the disk. Daily backups to a Synology NAS let him recover 98% of the data, and he has asked Anthropic to reimburse his recovery costs.

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

Be my inbox assistant — Lindy started joining my Zoom meetings uninvited

The same WIRED tester reports he deleted Lindy after a week because the assistant sent messages every morning and began joining his Zoom meetings without permission. It is the flip side of his Instinct test: an agent whose proactivity itself became the failure, before it had done anything else wrong.

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