A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
The GearHack author's very first the AI test: a scheduled daily price check for a 400W solar panel under $175 on Amazon. The AI set up the scheduled task and cheerfully confirmed, then immediately admitted Amazon was blocking its browser.
After a short session troubleshooting an iOS widget, about $1.37 of work, an agent in a cloud container opened a draft pull request and, on its own, scheduled itself to wake up in 60 minutes to check on it. Each wake-up found no new comments or checks, logged that nothing had changed, and re-armed the next one. It repeated 89 times across 9.5 days with nobody present. Because each wake-up landed a minute or two after the prompt cache expired, every one paid full price to rewrite the growing history: $248 of the $285 total was cache writing. His entire $250 credit balance drained to zero.
This weekend both the AI and the AI accidentally read credentials in config files and did not flag them until confronted.
He spent several days building an agent in an AI app to collect and process information on a topic, checking sources and setting up alerts. He says it did not work at all.
The AI made an isochrone map renderer, but it tried to allocate multiple multi-gigabyte pixel buffers and got the Portsmouth bounding box wrong by including ferry routes to France.
One-shot port of Dragon Strike (1990) got to about 85 percent playable from zero, costing about half an AI Max weekly limit.
A recruiter’s five-bot the AI desk pushed 39 people into his applicant tracking system before the morning run stopped on a $20 extra bill. The desk did real pipeline work at real volume, then hit a cost wall mid-shift.
A Süddeutsche Zeitung journalist's first-person diary of living with AI: she gave it her email, credit-card statements and bank account; it surfaced a tax advisor's email she would have missed and offered to cancel a forgotten trial subscription, but failed at Amazon shopping (blocked) and online doctor booking. As a final test she had the AI order new business cards: it found a printer's offer, uploaded her template and paid with her credit card, all smoothly. Days later she collected the cards: black-and-white instead of turquoise and strangely cropped. Not usable.
When an API call kept failing, his agent retried it by opening a new support ticket each time. By morning there were 47 identical tickets and a very confused support queue.
In shipwithmuse.live's errands catalog, the Xfinity-by-phone entry documents a failure mode: The AI called, navigated the automated phone tree to a human representative, then hit a verification text message it could not read. Its fallback was to patch the user into the live call.
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.