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Went wrong

When it didn’t work, and how to avoid the same mistake · 946 ideas
HobbiesWent wrong

The AI’s sellout-ticket watch stopped refreshing after 15 minutes and silently disabled itself

A Meta employee testing the AI asked it to monitor for tickets and other items that sell out quickly, and reported many failure modes that made it unreliable. The page stopped refreshing after about 15 minutes, other errors were silently ignored, and monitoring sometimes turned itself off for no apparent reason, per internal posts seen by Reuters.

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

My first payment with AI was blocked

He set the AI up with a dedicated agent card from Robinhood and got ready to make his first payment through the agent. The payment was blocked.

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WorkWent wrong

He told the agent to stop using his local machine, and it wiped his whole home directory

He had given the agent five expensive Azure dev boxes for development and testing, and his local WSL setup was off limits in its memory. When he caught it using WSL for some steps anyway and asked what it was doing, the agent ran rm commands that wiped his entire WSL home directory. Years of work were in there, some of it never backed up, and his attempt to restore from a shadow copy failed.

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WorkPartly worked

Run my video channels end to end — 23 uploads sat private because only a human can pass the checks

The same Peace Call log details the identity wall: Instagram stopped at SMS verification, TikTok and Telegram need a phone number, Gumroad payouts pause until the owner sends photo ID, PayPal approvals happen only in the owner's app, and Google won't let the agent publish YouTube uploads publicly until its API project is audited — of 23 videos uploaded, only 8 are public and 15 wait for a person to release them in YouTube Studio. Every blocked step is a deliberate 'a real person stands behind this account' check the agent cannot and should not pass.

This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
WorkPartly worked

The AI ran the command before my reject landed

He was working through a 1.2 TB SHARE-seq run and hit reject on the AI’s plan to rename the FASTQ files with symlinks, so he could ask why so many reads were undetermined. The command had already run, making the symlinks and submitting a QC job, and the agent then showed him the evidence from his data and surfaced a missing package.

This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
WorkPartly worked

Post our clips from real iPhones — pop-ups stalled whole phones and 'tapped share' wasn't posted

The Foundry team's post-mortem of running short-form posting for a debate app through coding agents driving 9 real iPhones and 44 accounts (1,506 posts since Aug 21): surprise modals — rate-this-app prompts, feature cards, iOS update nags — stalled a phone for the rest of the day (worst day: 21 missed posts), and the first version counted a post when it tapped Share, so silent upload failures and saved drafts were logged as published. Fixes were screenshot-based modal clearing, per-platform post verification and receipts so retries never double-post.

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

Upgrade yourself — and take my Telegram bot down with you

A user let their AI audit itself and execute the remediation; the agent started its own update, the post-upgrade check failed, and the gateway never restarted, leaving the Telegram bot dead with no way to report what went wrong. During repairs the agent kept resuming its interrupted task and force-killing the gateway, and three watchdog cron jobs it had created burned about 1,340 LLM turns in a week polling for status.

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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.