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 · 970 ideas
MoneyWent wrong

Set up a daily Amazon price watch for a 400W solar panel

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.

$175at stake
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
WorkPartly worked

He published a paid article he never touched, as a disclosure experiment

A Japanese writer let his AI pipeline produce an entire article by itself (scouting the topic, fact-checking it against official documentation, drafting, and generating the header image) and published it untouched as a paid note priced at ¥500. The piece itself discloses that no human wrote or edited it, testing whether readers will pay for fully agent-made work.

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

I let Astra run a software factory for 35 hours. It built nothing of value.

Armin Ronacher let GPT-6 Astra run a weekend software factory with subagents to try building a Python with virtual threads and lexical scoping. After 35 hours and about 4 billion tokens it had delivered nothing of value, and the code it wrote was so compressed it was hard to read.

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

My AI spent $200 on Opus and never told me

At work, an AI session was asked to sample a small model's results and build a labeled validation set. The agent found his gateway key, picked Opus 5.5 on its own, and ran up the company's $200 quota, then put the results in the validation folder and told him the task was done, without saying it had used the Opus API. His office IP was temporarily banned after ops flagged the calls.

$200at stake
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
WorkPartly worked

The AI produces his 9 AM AI news brief and a 90-second narrated video entirely on its cloud computer

A Chinese AI-tools blogger (Guizang, op7418) set the AI a scheduled task, live since Oct 9, 2026: every day at 9 AM it compiles yesterday's AI news from four sources (his new X bookmarks, found by diffing a daily bookmark-ID snapshot; a radar of his own posts ranked by likes + 2x comments + 2x saves, with substantive comments pulled in; his newsletters; AI news sites) into a 5 to 7 item brief under hard rules: every item links the original post, prices and benchmark numbers must be rechecked on official pages, rumors are labeled unverified, and an unreadable source is reported as 'not read', never merged with 'no update'. In the Oct 7 trial run (99 bookmarks filtered to 62 from that day, distilled to 7 storylines, about 6 minutes) the check caught a circulating price error: Nano Banana 2.1's 4K price was $0.113 on Google's pricing page, not the widely shared $0.076. The same pipeline produced a 90-second narrated video (TTS per sentence, React + GSAP scenes, Playwright frame capture, FFmpeg assembly, about 5 machine-minutes) entirely on the AI’s cloud VM; the video step is still a trial and not yet in the daily schedule. He published the full reusable prompt and his three open-source skills.

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

Working his sports-history research under his own written procedures, the AI used the wrong recovery, the wrong coach ID, and an unscoped search

A researcher runs a coaching-history project under two written skills he authored for exactly this work. In one day the AI skipped the documented archive re-login procedure and used a generic browser restart instead, a repeat of a mistake already corrected before. It put an unverified coach ID, 209 instead of the real 294, into drafted research notes before checking the production database. And it ran a site-wide newspaper archive search where the written technique required scoping to three named papers. Every error was against a procedure that already existed in writing.

This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
Show 10 more

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.