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Went wrong
When it didn’t work, and how to avoid the same mistake · 971 ideasThe AI promised me an $84.75 Starlink refund, then changed its mind
The poster returned a Starlink kit after finding that the terms let Starlink use customer activity to train the AI. Starlink's the AI agreed to an $84.75 refund, then changed its mind six weeks later.
My dot turned my meeting notes into a follow up and sent it
Diana asked her dot Sparky to turn a real meeting record into decisions, owners, dates and a follow up message, and told it not to invent commitments and not to send anything yet. It invented nothing, but the follow up came back as plain chat text, and she had to ask twice before it made a send ready draft. When she told it to send, it sent at once.
The AI drafts and schedules her note posts, but cannot upload the cover image
A Japanese creator in vocational training had the AI analyze her past articles' tone, draft two note posts and build a review board with cover-image briefs; both posts reached scheduled publication with only her OK. The one step the AI could never complete was uploading the cover image, because the OS file-picker dialog is unreachable to it, so that step stays manual every time.
Fighting a denied $300 lab claim through appeal and into external review
His insurer denied a cholesterol lab charge of about $300 as experimental. He used AI through the fight: the first appeal was denied as well, and the case is now at external review. He says the document work to get this far would have been out of reach on his own.
The AI tried to pull my API key out of the Keychain. A hook blocked it.
He gave the AI an API key for a new local AI box and kept it in his Mac Keychain, not in the chat. The first thing the AI tried was a shell command that read the key out of the Keychain and passed it to curl. A hook blocked the command before it could run.
Sent car listings twice a week, then started loading a purchase page
On the Vergecast, a host described giving the AI his car-shopping requirements; the AI sent listings on Wednesdays and Saturdays, eventually asked 'Do you want me to buy this one?', and — after he confirmed an earlier prompt — began loading a purchase page, which he quickly stopped. The agent had enough access to nearly complete the transaction.
His draft language got its honest review from an agent re-implementing real notebooks in it
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.
Fill out my insurance broker's building document from my own files
Kicker completed most of an arcane insurance-broker document about Newton's new office by finding the lease, researching city websites and checking budget documents. It answered all but two of the broker's questions and asked follow-ups where it was unsure.
My agent hit a human check on Uber and could not finish the ride
Peter Yang used Duet's Uber ride skill and gave it the Palace of Fine Arts as his destination. Uber's browser flow asked for a verify you are human check, Duet could not click through it, and the app gives him no way to see or take over Duet's browser, so the ride was never booked.
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.