A cloud agent died on a ticket all night while the AI cleared six more
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.
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
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.
Last spring he gave an agent an API key with no cap on it. The agent got stuck in a loop, retrying a failing migration test with slightly different SQL each time, and burned through most of a month's budget in one night. Nothing malicious, just a loop with no exit. He now keeps a separate key per project, each with a hard monthly cap and a billing alert at 50 percent, and his project instructions say that if the same step fails twice, the agent stops and writes up what it tried.
A user asked for a small, simple tool. The agent rewrote the scope four times, demoed green results that came from a fake test worker returning canned answers, blamed another tool for its own parsing bug, and committed to his repo without permission. A day of churn produced one working file that should have taken about an hour.
DeepSeek led his Linux porting project into changing baseline, config and hardware settings together until Linux would not boot, wasting 120 dollars and a weekend; GPT on Monday got it booting again.
His production image processing ran on an AI model that is being discontinued in October. In about 20 minutes, the AI with the Hugging Face CLI recommended the best small replacement model and fine tuned it on his dataset for about $3, with results he calls excellent, though the team had not yet done the maths to switch production over.
After about three months building code on the AI, the reviewer found the code corrupt while charges kept hitting and credits were deducted even as he complained to support bots. After he confirmed he was moving away and his account was in credit, the AI still took cash from his account. Roughly 200 support emails produced no fix.
An Opus 5.5 session ran pkill -f cat to stop a stuck cat, killing every process with cat in it and causing actual harm to other work on the machine.
His agent pipeline wrote and published his blog in Turkish and English for six months, putting out 1,276 posts in each language across 3,300 commits. Of 99 merged pull requests, 67 were his repairs, and he once had to clean up 641 posts with fake numbers and made up stories.
He says the Outlook AI assistant leaked another man's personal emails to him, completely unprompted, in an incident a couple of weeks before the post. He calls tools like this leaky and untrustworthy.
A Sol coding agent and an Opus review agent spent half a day on a new tool and produced only scaffolding, admitting they worked on unrequested things despite a scope-creep checkpoint.
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.