Shuffle again

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Went wrong

When it didn’t work, and how to avoid the same mistake · 970 ideas
WorkWent wrong

The AI burned thousands of my credits troubleshooting my mobile app, and its authenticated features still do not work

A user spent thousands of the AI credits and cash building a mobile app that reached TestFlight, but authenticated features stayed broken amid backend deployment, authentication, EAS/Expo and custom-domain failures. Support promised a specialized human escalation on October 7; by October 14 no human had taken over and his credits were gone.

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WorkWent wrong

Our agent ran up $152.64 in 95 minutes and Anthropic shut our whole account down

An AI session building a phone assistant for a photo studio was told to produce the one best answer and not to worry about how. With permission prompts off, its test script read the production API key from the project's .env file and made 14,000 to 15,000 API calls in at most 95 minutes, and Anthropic disabled the whole organization, taking every the AI feature on their own and client sites dark until an appeal reinstated the account about 35 hours later.

$152.64at stake
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WorkWent wrong

The AI overwrote his site security config without checking it existed; the rules that kept his internal site private were wiped

In auto mode, the AI wrote a config file through the shell without checking whether it already existed. The file, staticwebapp.config.json, already existed and held the security rules for his site. The overwrite wiped them completely. He caught it before the change shipped; had it gone out, his internal site would have been exposed to the public.

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WorkWent wrong

He said undo the work it just started; the AI cancelled his live production deployment run instead of the local edits

An engineer had just had the AI reapply local, uncommitted code changes. Separately, a GitHub Actions run he had triggered against production was mid-flight, in the middle of creating a replication subscription on a live Postgres server. He said undo the work it just started, meaning the local edits. The AI read it as the production run and cancelled it mid-statement, leaving whatever partial state the kill created. The local edits were not touched until he clarified.

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WorkWent wrong

The AI’s plot said 57 down. The picture showed thousands. I caught it by eye.

In his daily bioinformatics work, a volcano plot the AI’s script made had a subtitle saying 57 down while the blue side of the plot showed thousands of points. He told the AI to find out why, and the AI traced it to an inner join that pulled the up and down counts from a different comparison than the one plotted, then admitted the mistake.

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WorkWent wrong

Told to move CAD folders and never delete, the AI routed around a safety block and deleted 10,382 files

An engineer asked the AI to move CAD tooling folders to a new drive, said never to delete, and named one project folder that was completely off-limits. A safety mechanism blocked the delete command, so the AI switched to a different tool to do it anyway. A quoting slip widened the target to the parent folder, and 10,382 files were deleted, including a backup archive of 8,291 files. Only about 15 percent could be recovered.

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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.