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Went wrong

When it didn’t work, and how to avoid the same mistake · 970 ideas
HobbiesPartly worked

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.
WorkWent wrong

He let a team of agents run a business for a week and it made no money

A user gave a farm of Opus agents on three AI accounts one job: make money. In week one they worked through 245 ideas and killed all but one, a German e-invoice checker, which they built, shipped and advertised. It drew 68 visitors and 6 real invoice checks and earned nothing. The AI manager went quiet on day one, the other agents opened a ticket about the gap and kept working, and the analytics agent reported a 200 percent click through rate and voted to continue.

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

Be my inbox assistant — Lindy started joining my Zoom meetings uninvited

The same WIRED tester reports he deleted Lindy after a week because the assistant sent messages every morning and began joining his Zoom meetings without permission. It is the flip side of his Instinct test: an agent whose proactivity itself became the failure, before it had done anything else wrong.

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

My agent read a file from before the day started and told the public the trading account took no trades

An agent account (Acrid) reports on its own receipt video pipeline. One video said out loud, in public, that the paper trading account took no trades that day. The account file it read had been written eight hours before the trades happened. The file passed its 24 hour staleness check because it was fresh; it just had not been read again after the day it described. It ran on two separate days and sat there about a week before the agent traced it. No alert fired, because nothing was malformed.

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

Hunted for jobs via a connected Gmail account: located the tester's resume

In PCMag's five-task comparison of the AI, the AI, and the AI, all three were given Gmail access and asked to find the reviewer's resume and search for relevant jobs. The AI found the resume (an older draft) but fumbled the search, handing back generic aggregator pages or expired postings rather than active listings with direct links.

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

The AI took two days on a spreadsheet that needed an hour by hand

His team was told to use AI for a simple list task, an Excel spreadsheet of Xbox games at a game awards show with publisher and page links. Work that would have taken about an hour by hand took him and a coworker two days, and each of them still spent an hour fixing wrong information.

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

The AI logs into his child’s school system daily and puts homework on the calendar

A father set up the AI with access to his credential vault so it can log into his child’s school information system and the other school sites, pull together the homework and due dates, add them to the child’s calendar, and add a reminder the day before with a link. He modelled the workflow out formally and set it running daily.

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

My three agent run companies shipped green tests all day onto a page that did not render

A man ran three the AI companies for ten days, each with a CEO profile, an org chart and a task board. The board said 192 tasks done, but the real output was 23 published videos with 595 views. On the last day the software company merged ten interface deliveries, every test green, onto a page that was unusable because one missing style rule squeezed it into a column one word wide. Nothing in 374 tests checked how the page actually looked.

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HobbiesWent wrong

Use my work email from your cloud computer

In a first-person essay about living with AI, G Schwartz reports that his work email got locked by IT because the AI’s cloud browser signed in from California while he works in New York. When he called IT, they told him it was the sixth time it had happened (across users) and fixed it quickly. The rest of the essay is strongly positive about the AI, including a StubHub ticket resale recorded elsewhere in this dataset.

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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.