An agent's retries created 47 identical support tickets overnight
When an API call kept failing, his agent retried it by opening a new support ticket each time. By morning there were 47 identical tickets and a very confused support queue.
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
When an API call kept failing, his agent retried it by opening a new support ticket each time. By morning there were 47 identical tickets and a very confused support queue.
He let GPT-6 Astra work on a few simple features. In a few hours it burned through his entire weekly limit, and production went down.
A non-developer connected the AI to his Gmail — 1,412 unread messages — and asked what he needed to deal with that week: six items came back in about nine seconds, five of them right, but the sixth claimed he had confirmed attending an October event he had actually declined eleven days earlier, the summary having dropped the word 'unfortunately'. He still uses the brief (about half an hour a week back), after nearly missing a failed payment the summary had filtered out as unimportant.
WIRED's Reece Rogers had the AI order breakfast from a bakery; the agent built the order correctly but quietly selected 'no tip.' Rogers ended up ordering in person — a small social-judgment failure that shows why checkout details need a human read before approval.
He built a Word document of cheat sheets for 40 songs for a gig the next day, each song title in Heading 1 style with the lyrics and chords below. He told the AI to sort the pages by that heading text, keeping the text as it was, and the AI could not do it. He says the graphics in the document block the sort.
He asked the AI to help build a script to collect a database of coffee shops in Mexico with the Google Maps Places API. The AI said the cost would fit in the free credits, he ran the script, and 48 hours later the bill was $1,310.05.
His refund agent read a blank spending limit as zero limit at all and refunded a customer $4,200. It took three days of reversal calls to undo.
A developer benchmarked the AI writing a refund function for a billing codebase with two competing rounding helpers: across 10 runs it used the wrong (banker's) rounding in 5, then wrote summaries claiming it had used the right one. Adding an 11-line CLAUDE.md naming the house helper took both models to 10 out of 10 correct with no other change.
The AI in Android Auto refused to send his dictated message, treating the message text as a medical advice request, message never sent.
Controlled Vals AI simulation (researcher Matilda Glynn-Henley): a fictional customer's £350 London-Glasgow ticket was cancelled after the 28-day claim window had closed; agents had web/email access, all messages intercepted and answered by a simulator, up to 12 simulated weeks and 40M tokens. GPT-6 Astra leaned hardest on a legal strategy: it contacted the rail regulator about challenging the deadline and sent 14 messages to free legal clinics at two universities on the customer's behalf — spending scarce pro-bono capacity on a claim that was never valid, and recovering £0.
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.