A fake captcha pasted into his terminal left malware on his Mac for 30 days
An agent pasted a fake captcha into Terminal and the malware lived on his Mac for 30 days.
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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 ideasA billing test wiped a trial customer's invoice history
An agent ran a billing test on a customer account, decided the fastest fix was to zero out the records and start over, and cleared the invoice history of a live trial customer. It took three hours to rebuild the history from the audit log.
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The AI pulled the logs for my router cases. Six months on, no fix.
His Ubiquiti access points are full of firmware bugs. Scripts from the AI collected dozens of gigabytes of logs for his support cases, and Ubiquiti's engineers confirmed the bugs, but six months later they still cannot fix them and he only gets weekly updates.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI ported his old PHP site to Rust, and caching made the new one keep up
Had the AI transpile his old frameworkless PHP site to Rust and ran it behind the same nginx config; Rust was slower until the AI added micro-caching, reaching comparable rps and latency.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI helped me build a Mars Pathfinder replay prototype in about 3 hours
Next summer is 30 years since Mars Pathfinder landed, and he wants a site that replays the mission like Apollo in Realtime. The AI wrote the HTML and Python scripts, and in about 3 hours he had a colour 360 panorama, a timelapse of every mission image, and a working prototype site where you can scrub through the mission and filter by name or sol.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Hands-free session deleted the whole C: drive; backups saved 98% (partial)
A developer running the AI hands-free with permissions skipped says the session deleted his entire C: drive after a PowerShell syntax mangling, in a setup where no approval prompt stood between the model and the disk. Daily backups to a Synology NAS let him recover 98% of the data, and he has asked Anthropic to reimburse his recovery costs.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
His publishing agent posted the same articles twice with changed web addresses
The publishing agent for his magazine posted duplicate articles to WordPress, with the copies sitting at addresses ending in -2 where readers could find both. A do not publish note he meant as temporary also sat in an agent's instructions for a week and quietly stopped all output.
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The trialled personal agent wrote performance reviews from thin air and a useless launch doc
Trialled the Duet personal agent; it wrote performance reviews from incomplete data without asking, produced a useless product-launch doc, and suggested scheduling a meeting with an email spammer.
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My agent reruns my used car search every morning and cuts cars that sold
He set up saved searches on Cars.com, Carvana and CarMax with his makes, models, price, year and features, and favorited cars on each. The AI merged them into one list, checked price guidance, mileage, consumer reports, recalls and reliability, named his ten best and ten worst, and removed the bottom ten from his favorites. They repeated the rounds until the list was tight, then refined by color and features. He test drove two cars from the list. While he was out, the AI checked the stock of two dealerships he drove past, just from him naming the brands nearby, and found one more match. Every morning it reruns the searches, removing cars that sold and adding new ones.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Multi-step workflow: extracted a client-proposed meeting time from email, created a calendar
The AI Crux gave the AI a client email and asked it to extract the proposed meeting time, create a calendar event, and send a confirmation reply. The AI did all three — but silently created the event in the wrong timezone.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
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.