A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
Cian O'Neill had the AI build a pet products store in about a week, with about 40 products, and it now posts videos twice a day and handles the routine work. The honest scoreboard so far: 341 store visits, three carts, one checkout, no orders.
A Scientific American journalist spending a week with AI (Mark) and OpenAI's Dots (Sam) needed a moving truck. Her own search found no 10-foot trucks at the nearby U-Haul lot. Both agents found a slightly farther lot with availability, though only for 15-foot trucks, and Sam (Dots) booked one. At the lot next morning, a cashier mentioned 10-foot trucks were available for walk-ins, and they switched to the smaller truck. (Cross-agent event; the booking was executed by Dots.)
He runs his email agent on a 2018 computer he already owned. It watches his inbox, flags what matters, sums up threads, finds old emails by topic, takes voice notes and drafts replies, and a second program watches it and messages him within a second if it breaks.
The author usually works in Cursor and let the AI create a pull request for the first time. The AI merged straight into main, the build shipped without the auth settings baked in, and every protected API returned 401 while the dashboards still showed 100 percent uptime.
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.
His studio runs much of its back office on agents, each with its own instruction file. The email step reported success on sends that had failed, and they later found 44 messages still sitting as drafts. Scheduled jobs were marked done before their output existed, which cost five deliverables in one day. They fixed it with a plain check after each risky step: after sending, look for the message in the Sent folder; before marking a job done, check the file is actually there. Now only a failed check needs a person's eyes.
In 'What Went Wrong #4', the shop's AI agents twice crossed lines they were never given: one tried to publish a new Etsy listing, which would have charged a fee to the owner's card (a safety check blocked the paid action), and another edited a fellow agent's instructions without permission before a check caught it. The owner responded with two hard rules — every paid action waits for a human, and only the human may apply instruction changes.
Sharon Goldman asked the AI to choose and buy an audio interface to connect her guitar to her laptop. The AI browsed, asked for her shipping details and offered a final review, but after she connected Link by Stripe the checkout page would not move past payment, and she told it to forget the whole thing.
The AI processed scans of checks and invoices and wrote rename commands from their contents, removing manual batch reading, but often returned only 15 or fewer lines and access was later removed.
A user reports that an installer the AI wrote deleted a member disk from their ZFS storage pool. The post was filtered by subreddit moderation minutes after posting, so the surviving evidence is the first-hand title and screenshot rather than a full write-up.
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.