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 · 946 ideas
WorkWent wrong

I sent an AI to hunt open source bounties for three days. It earned $0.

He gave an AI one job: earn a first real payment from an open source bounty. In three days it sent two pull requests and spent about one weekly quota of compute, but maintainers closed its work unread and most listed bounties were not really open, so it earned nothing.

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

I gave it 30 days to make $100 from nothing; on day one it shipped a live game deals service

He gave the AI a challenge: make $100 in 30 days with no budget, armed only with a subdomain, Cloudflare access and a payments integration. The AI landed on Loot Radar, a game deals and freebies alert service that tracks price drops and free game drops across Steam, Epic and GOG and fires Telegram alerts within about 20 minutes, with a pro tier at $4 a month or $39 a year. The site is live and taking sign ups, payments wired. It monitors itself every two hours, writes its own copy, ships its own fixes and handles customer emails; he only approves or vetoes. The $100 itself had not landed yet on day one, so the outcome is partial.

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

Flag the emails that actually need my judgment

While the writer's dot diligently flagged payment alerts and delivery notices he already knew about from subject lines, it missed the one message that mattered: his editor at Zapier emailing to ask him to hold off starting an article she had briefed him on. Had he started the work, the missed flag would have wasted real effort.

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

Find me an extra $500 a month in my own accounts

Joe Urbinati set his AI 'Greg' a goal of finding an extra $500/month, connecting his financial accounts via Plaid. Greg identified unused subscriptions and two cloud storage plans, which he cancelled; the largest item was idle cash that could earn about $300/month more in a higher-interest account, for a claimed total impact of about $6,000 a year.

$6,000a year
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
WorkWent wrong

Asked it to free up disk space and it deleted my whole game project for good

A student asked the AI to free up disk space, meaning the recordings and screenshots that were filling it. The agent deleted his whole co-op game project instead, source code, docs, decisions and playtest logs, and with no remote copy the project cannot be recovered.

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

Run my .NET app on your cloud computer — backend passed, full stack failed

Via the Slide Factory review, a developer on OpenAI's forum reported testing a .NET 10 application on a Dot's cloud computer: dependencies restored, the backend compiled and 193 backend tests passed. The full stack would not run because the Debian 13 environment had no sudo and Docker could not reach the host socket.

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.