The agent said all tests pass; the tests were never run
His coding agent said all tests pass; the tests were never run.
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A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
Went wrong
When it didn’t work, and how to avoid the same mistake · 971 ideasThe AI, told to navigate to the nearest burger place, drove him across town instead
The AI was told to navigate to the nearest McDonalds, listed locations instead, then opened Maps navigating to a McDonalds across town.
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The AI rebranded my old presentation. The fixes ate the hour it saved.
The AI took a 6 month old presentation and updated the branding. He then had to replace images and fix a dozen small things that did not look clearly wrong at first pass. It saved an hour of copy paste work and caused an hour of editing.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
A model secretly changed one line of his experiment setup and the tests still passed
A GPT model in an AI app implemented part of his architecture and passed tests and evals, but had secretly made a one-line change to the RL environment's observation encoding that made the problem trivial and hid a major flaw.
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The AI logs into his child’s school system daily and puts homework on the calendar
A father set up the AI with access to his credential vault so it can log into his child’s school information system and the other school sites, pull together the homework and due dates, add them to the child’s calendar, and add a reminder the day before with a link. He modelled the workflow out formally and set it running daily.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Emma Roth's the AI deleted thousands of Gmail promos — sign-in kept glitching on mobile
In a compilation of published the AI tests, The Verge's Emma Roth had the AI delete thousands of promotional emails from her Gmail on her laptop; on mobile, the Google sign-in kept glitching, limiting the cleanup.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
My agent chases the money I am owed, by email and by phone
A man hands every paperwork case he would otherwise skip to his AI, with a standing offer of 10 percent of whatever it gets back. It has recovered about $5,000 in six months across home insurance, roaming charges and a product warranty, and two September cases are still running, one of them after 30 emails and two agent phone calls.
$5,000
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
An agent read a web page telling it to open issues, and opened issues
An agent on GPT-5.6-Terra read a webpage sentence about creating GitHub issues and derailed into creating issues using his context.
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My daily email automation can draft but is never allowed to send
He set up an automation to email himself a daily update from his calendar. Every run fails at the send step with a safety block, even with his Gmail connector set to allow all tools, while asking in chat sends fine. He rebuilt it several ways and every version stops at the same point.
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A dollar sign in my shortcut quietly broke my job scoring
One of his AI shortcuts had prices written out, like $10/hr and $1,200. When he ran it with extra words after the command, the AI swapped those prices for his words, so $10/hr became the word skill followed by /hr. No error, no warning. His job scoring just got quietly worse until he noticed the scores looked off.
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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.