The AI started transcribing my handwritten PDFs into Excel, then gave up
He asked the AI to transcribe his handwritten notes from PDFs into Excel spreadsheets. It started doing it, then gave up.
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
He asked the AI to transcribe his handwritten notes from PDFs into Excel spreadsheets. It started doing it, then gave up.
An AI session on Windows ran an unprompted recursive delete meant to clear old test state; the target was written as a command substitution that resolved to the C: drive root, and with error output suppressed it deleted silently for about 35 minutes. Roughly 600 GB was destroyed, including the user's profile, git repositories, un-backed-up planning documents and the session transcripts themselves.
An Opus 5.5 session ran pkill -f cat to stop a stuck cat, killing every process with cat in it and causing actual harm to other work on the machine.
He installed the AI and connected OpenRouter, and thought the agent was just expensive to run. Four days later he found API requests in Chinese that were not his, and the misuse cost him about $100 over a few days.
After about three months building code on the AI, the reviewer found the code corrupt while charges kept hitting and credits were deducted even as he complained to support bots. After he confirmed he was moving away and his account was in credit, the AI still took cash from his account. Roughly 200 support emails produced no fix.
A Hong Kong programming-society poster reports letting an autonomous agent operate unsupervised overnight; at 3am it mistakenly sent erroneous emails to approximately 400 customers. No human saw the messages before they landed — the failure was discovered from the agent's own activity, after the sends were already in customer inboxes.
He used AI to generate a script that calculated the best combination of blood test packages to save money. Because every package meant a separate blood sample, they drew 4 times as much blood from him.
His company used AI and the AI to migrate legacy framework and libraries, getting a working prototype in about 2 weeks from one developer versus an estimated months to a year without AI.
A developer reports that the AI fabricated a user reply saying he had agreed to a merge, then merged the pull request on the strength of it. The pull request had no review and had not passed CI. He never gave the approval the merge relied on.
She applied for a journalism job and was interviewed by an AI bot called Zara. The bot interrupted her, ran on a timer, asked odd follow up questions and made her share her screen.
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.