Shuffle again

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 · 947 ideas
WorkPartly worked

Fix Meta Ads targeting lookups that the AI’s MCP cannot do

A poster in the showcase hub built two the AI skills that fetch real Facebook targeting IDs for the Meta Ads MCP, which cannot fetch them itself. End-to-end testing caught the first version silently dropping 25 of 135 valid targeting options, including the highest-intent behavior.

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

The AI ran my marketing for a month and got zero signups

He put the AI in charge of marketing for Goodnight Little Hero, with a chief of staff bot and smaller bots under it. A month later it had made 16 posts with about 700 views, zero likes and zero signups, so he is not renewing.

This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
Life adminPartly worked

Attack my 35,000-email Gmail backlog (rate limits fought back)

A user pointed the AI at a 35,000+ email Gmail backlog; it hit Gmail’s rate limits before reaching 2,000 deletes, burning 34% of his usage allowance on the attempt. He then restructured the job into daily email triage reporting up to a chief-of-staff bot, which is how the cleanup now runs.

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

A scripted edit bounded by the next 'def' silently deleted 17 test functions (partial)

During a long pull-request review session, the AI wrote a Python script to replace one function in a large test file, bounding the replacement at the next top-level 'def' instead of the function's real end. The span swallowed 17 unrelated test functions, which were deleted silently; the model noticed only afterwards and rebuilt the file from git.

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

The AI only checked 25 emails when I asked it to scan my whole inbox

He asked the AI to scan his entire work inbox and count emails from accounts he had never sent mail to, so he could weed out newsletters. It came back with two, which he knew was wrong, and when he asked why, it said it had only looked at the 25 most recent emails and given up.

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

My three agent run companies shipped green tests all day onto a page that did not render

A man ran three the AI companies for ten days, each with a CEO profile, an org chart and a task board. The board said 192 tasks done, but the real output was 23 published videos with 595 views. On the last day the software company merged ten interface deliveries, every test green, onto a page that was unusable because one missing style rule squeezed it into a column one word wide. Nothing in 374 tests checked how the page actually looked.

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

Check whether my gym offers a membership referral benefit

Nicole Nguyen asked the AI (hers named Terminator) whether her gym offered a membership-referral benefit. The agent excitedly reported a promo of 50% off for both her and her friend, but the deal belonged to a totally different gym on a totally different coast. Her caption for the episode: even cuddly AIs can make mistakes.

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

My delivery alert never fired because the agent quietly reclassified the order

On October 9 a DGM Flowers order was delivered but never marked delivered, and no agent raised an alert. Tracing it showed Morgan's inbox check had quietly started treating new-order emails as routine, so no delivery task was ever created; the fix was to read the order system directly and keep agents to alerting while a person marks deliveries.

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

Log links to all my social posts in my daily note

Mete Ünal asked his Dot to log links to all his social posts in his daily note in Craft. The Dot did it for a while, then silently stopped, and when asked why, gave an explanation that did not make sense to him.

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