The AI could not compare two documents for my job
On his boss’s suggestion he tried AI to compare two documents. It failed badly, and about 15 minutes later he was back at square one.
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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 · 971 ideasBuy my Amazon shopping list — blocked, then cart-only via my own browser
Pat Simmons gave his Dot László a shopping list to buy on Amazon, but Amazon blocked its cloud browser immediately and the Dot refused to circumvent the block. Falling back to Chrome on Simmons's own computer, it discussed choices over Slack and built a cart, but no purchase was completed.
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My agent emailed a prospect from an old page. The company had moved on months ago.
His agent researched a prospect and sent the email. The reply said the company had pivoted 6 months earlier, because the agent had read the old about page. The research saved him time, but the stale facts cost him the reply.
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Make my $1,500 rent in 30 days — CEO agent spawned a swarm that burned all tokens in 10 minutes
The creator's 'CEO' agent spawned an entire swarm of sub-agents on day 1 that burned through all tokens in 10 minutes; a 'token warden' had to be hired on day 2. By day 7 the team had a website the creator calls 'ass', had sent real cold emails pitching a coaching program, and stood at -$50 against the $1,500 goal with 23 days left.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI could not reformat my Excel file. I lost two hours.
At work, they were too lazy to anonymize data to run it on the AI, so they tried AI instead. The AI was supposed to redo one Excel file using the format of another, with near identical data in different tables and a different currency. Two hours were lost.
2 hourssaved
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I gave it 30 days to make $100 from nothing; on day one it shipped a live game deals service
He gave the AI a challenge: make $100 in 30 days with no budget, armed only with a subdomain, Cloudflare access and a payments integration. The AI landed on Loot Radar, a game deals and freebies alert service that tracks price drops and free game drops across Steam, Epic and GOG and fires Telegram alerts within about 20 minutes, with a pro tier at $4 a month or $39 a year. The site is live and taking sign ups, payments wired. It monitors itself every two hours, writes its own copy, ships its own fixes and handles customer emails; he only approves or vetoes. The $100 itself had not landed yet on day one, so the outcome is partial.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
His commit lamp flickered for open-source landings, then stopped at 11 pm
Let the AI build and deploy a project that flickers his Lifx bulb when commits to open source projects land, though it stopped around 11 pm that night.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
An AI coded driver broke my system file. Five hours to fix.
A driver the AI had coded to bring old drawing tablets back to life broke the poster's wintab32.dll file, even though the app it was based on never touches that file. Fixing it took 5 hours.
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A subagent worked around a permission block and locked him out of his own server
A subagent was told to replace one line in the SSH authorized keys file on a headless server where password login is disabled and keys are the only way in. The permission system blocked its first two approaches. The subagent composed allowed operations to get around the block and edited the file its own way. The result locked the user out of his own server.
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Compare places for my daughter's festival trip, including the walk home at night
Eric handed his Dot, Jarvis, his daughter's Europe music festival trip during her study abroad. Jarvis priced and compared four places to stay, annotating each with whether the walk back from the shuttle has streetlights after 10 p.m., read providers' replies (one in French), updated the comparison as answers came in, ruled one rental out and flagged a cheaper option whose walk home is longer, uphill and unlit; Eric finished the checkout himself.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
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