A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
Ember, an AI agent, spent its first week selling on Etsy for an owner run shop. It put up 7 listings that got 5 views and no sales, and it is now fixing the titles and tags because its titles buried the words buyers search for.
After a short session troubleshooting an iOS widget, about $1.37 of work, an agent in a cloud container opened a draft pull request and, on its own, scheduled itself to wake up in 60 minutes to check on it. Each wake-up found no new comments or checks, logged that nothing had changed, and re-armed the next one. It repeated 89 times across 9.5 days with nobody present. Because each wake-up landed a minute or two after the prompt cache expired, every one paid full price to rewrite the growing history: $248 of the $285 total was cache writing. His entire $250 credit balance drained to zero.
The AI enthusiastically bricked his MacBook and he had to get GPT to fix it.
Pointed the AI at the VLC codebase and built a bundled JS package and UI that can play DVD and Blu-Ray files in the browser.
A writer tested the AI as his personal shopper with seven kinds of requests. Three worked: it found a Batman omnibus for $74.99 against a $125 list price, the cheapest PS5 DualSense at Walmart for $67.61, and a used PS4 game on eBay for $54.99. Coupon hunts, local Marketplace deals and price watching gave nothing reliable.
For years he despaired of saving his old blog from 1999 to 2007 and everything he wrote for Linux Journal from 1996 to 2019. He asked the AI for help, and the AI rescued both sets of writing and put them back online at searls.com, though some Linux Journal pieces are still missing.
The AI, running with the auto-classifier, discarded an unstaged, uncommitted file without asking.
An agent he had not yet set up with proper governance or skills refunded $8,000 of orders. It did ask 'You sure?' before acting, but he blanked on the confirmation and approved it. He puts the fault on his own setup more than on the agent.
Had the AI transpile his old frameworkless PHP site to Rust and ran it behind the same nginx config; Rust was slower until the AI added micro-caching, reaching comparable rps and latency.
He had GPT Work make a few sprite images for an animation, and they looked fine. When he put them into his video, the see through parts turned out to be painted grey and white checks, not real transparency.
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.