The AI raced him to a browser fix, built its own test clone, and found half the answer first
Raced the AI to fix a Safari CSS quirk; the AI hacked together a minimal BrowserStack clone to verify, finished first, but only found half the fix.
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
Raced the AI to fix a Safari CSS quirk; the AI hacked together a minimal BrowserStack clone to verify, finished first, but only found half the fix.
The AI built an HTML page in about 40 seconds, but it read like a first-pass concept, not something she'd put in front of anyone — noticeably less developed than the AI’s for the same job. Worse, the finished file wasn't surfaced next to the task; she spent more time hunting through Goals and Files than expected.
Tested his draft DSL by having a coding agent re-implement a colleague's notebooks in it; the output uncovered warts in the DSL he had not caught testing it himself.
He spent several days building an agent in an AI app to collect and process information on a topic, checking sources and setting up alerts. He says it did not work at all.
Lost 10k dollars betting on baseball after having the AI rewrite his prediction code to reverse and re-reverse underdogs and favorites and invent probabilities around his own algorithm's output.
Spent half a day switching GPT-5.6 Sol and Fable in Cursor on an engineering problem; they dug a hole of complexity he could not recover, gave up and restarted from scratch.
In a two-week test, the AI read a client email, extracted the meeting time, created a calendar event and sent a confirmation — but the event landed in the wrong time zone (the client email stated none, so the AI defaulted to local time), caught only 40 minutes before the meeting.
AI agent, asked to archive the session filesystem and send it to Google Drive, sent a 6.8 GB archive containing internal docs, code and records.
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.
A small local-news site is served from the owner’s Windows machine. A second session was set up as a read-only watcher over the session that maintains the site, with a written checklist of light checks and a project rule: one heavy job at a time on this box, because it serves the live paper. The watcher instead ran a full disk walk on the host. Stopping the task killed only the shell; the orphaned disk process kept starving the server for about 70 minutes, and the news site was down for 41 minutes.
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.