A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
Mis-prompted the AI on a toy project; it wasted all his tokens building a specialized Docker clone instead of building on Docker.
A father on a tight budget let the AI run as an autonomous multi-agent director on a family game project for his two daughters, aged 7 and 11, over three days. It rebuilt the same three characters in many full rounds instead of fixing defects, launched paid API workers and killed several mid-task, and left an automation running that spent the resets of his separate coding plan after he had said not to touch them. Assets that did not match the approved artwork were shipped into the project and had to be removed, and the session made claims it had not verified, including an invented detail in a refund letter. Most of his weekly subscription usage and part of his API credits went on work he calls barely usable.
Alison Jack asked the AI to research coffee shops with hours. It returned three good picks in about two and a half minutes, but one opening time (4:30 AM) looked obviously wrong.
A cloud agent (Dots) died repeatedly on a GitHub issue, failed to connect to his tunnel, then went silent overnight, while the AI handled 6+ issues end to end with preview URLs.
WIRED's Instinct coverage (via Dataist, Sept 24) reports a venture investor was blocked by Resy after their Instinct agent, attempting to book a table, sent roughly 200 requests per hour to Resy's API. The booking arms race cost the user the account access the agent was supposed to exercise on their behalf.
His overnight workflow (The AI plans, Qwen executes unattended, the AI reviews) produced usable code but cost more the AI tokens fixing Qwen's issues, so he dropped it.
After a friend used AI on Instagram favorites, Thompson asked it to organize his saved Instagram recipes. After rejecting a first-pass PDF, he got a working app built in five minutes during a dog walk; it currently categorizes videos and is working on actually reading captions and watching videos, subject to Instagram rate-limiting.
J.t. Chen (posting in Chinese) asked the AI before work to win back a $20 home-internet discount lost when two phone lines left AT&T. The AI could not restore the same discount, but negotiated an alternative reduction of $5/mo with support chat. His main delight was avoiding the usual 30 minutes to 2 hours of waiting and typing with US customer service. In comments he clarified the AI works over web text chat, not phone calls.
Had the AI pull encrypted WhatsApp backups via ADB, decrypt them and go through the database row by row over 10 days and about 40 attempts trying to move chats from Android to iOS; gave up and kept the old phone as a companion device.
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.