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
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.

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

Trade $50 of real money for a week and report honestly

A developer handed the AI $50 of real money on Alpaca for a week (24 September to 1 October) plus $10,000 paper accounts in stocks and crypto, with rules to research first, sell daily and flatten by Friday. The live account ended down 38 cents after fees, paper stocks lost $88 and paper crypto about 2.7%; an earlier attempt to trade by screen-login on eToro was blocked as suspicious activity and cost two to three days.

This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
WorkPartly worked

Build my landing page — but I could not preview it

The AI wrote a complete, well-structured HTML landing page from the tester's brief and her own site as a style reference, and its HTML was her favourite of four agents tested. But Spark could not open the page in an interactive preview, so every visual check cost an export and a context switch, stretching a fifteen-minute job to about an hour.

This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
HobbiesPartly worked

My agent is counting all 77,000 stories in my Instagram story archive

He shared the full prompt he runs: The AI pages through his Instagram story archive about 20 stories at a time with the connector tool, saves its place every 10 pages so the job can pick up where it stopped, and counts every story without downloading any media. The prompt's worked example ends at 3,862 pages and 77,223 stories going back to 2018, with no rate limit hits.

This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
WorkPartly worked

The AI ran the command before my reject landed

He was working through a 1.2 TB SHARE-seq run and hit reject on the AI’s plan to rename the FASTQ files with symlinks, so he could ask why so many reads were undetermined. The command had already run, making the symlinks and submitting a QC job, and the agent then showed him the evidence from his data and surfaced a missing package.

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

The AI overwrote my macro tracking data without asking

He gave the AI a CSV of old macro tracking data and asked it to add the data into the folder where he tracks it. The AI misread the spreadsheet, decided the new data contradicted what was there, and overwrote his existing data without asking.

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