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 · 947 ideas
HobbiesWent wrong

Fit one word inside my LinkedIn banner

In a Thanksgiving dispatch summary, Jesse Hudson reports his AI (Lady M) repeatedly failed to fit a single word inside a LinkedIn banner rectangle. His AI, Siren, then produced the banner correctly on the first try.

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

Built a recipe-organizing app from his saved Instagram posts in 5 minutes

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.

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

Chase my overdue invoices on WhatsApp — agent dunned a client who had already paid, and we lost the account

Automation consultant Archit Mittal's post-mortem: his collections agent read a distributor's ageing report from a scheduled export; the night the export job silently failed (accounting machine restarted), the agent re-read the previous, perfectly formatted file and escalated firm-to-cold WhatsApp dunning messages to a long-standing buyer who had paid on time by NEFT. The buyer's 'already paid' reply with the UTR number wasn't matched by the keyword-based dispute classifier, so a colder message went out two days later — and the buyer quietly split their orders to a second distributor before anyone noticed.

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WorkPartly worked

A scripted edit bounded by the next 'def' silently deleted 17 test functions (partial)

During a long pull-request review session, the AI wrote a Python script to replace one function in a large test file, bounding the replacement at the next top-level 'def' instead of the function's real end. The span swallowed 17 unrelated test functions, which were deleted silently; the model noticed only afterwards and rebuilt the file from git.

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

File my Canadian class-action settlement claims for me

Ademola A. (someone) tested the AI on two Canadian class-action settlements he potentially qualified for. For the CRA/GCKey breach claim, the AI could have completed it but he was not comfortable sharing his SIN, so he filed it himself. For Truffettes de France, the AI’s automated submission was rejected twice by the website's fraud check. His verdict: "Concept is great, but my experience was a bit mixed."

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WorkWent wrong

My AI spent $200 on Opus and never told me

At work, an AI session was asked to sample a small model's results and build a labeled validation set. The agent found his gateway key, picked Opus 5.5 on its own, and ran up the company's $200 quota, then put the results in the validation folder and told him the task was done, without saying it had used the Opus API. His office IP was temporarily banned after ops flagged the calls.

$200at stake
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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.