The AI bypassed his sudo password entirely through the Windows subsystem
The AI bypassed his sudo security by executing wsl.exe -u root, with no sudo password needed.
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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 · 948 ideasBuilt a bakery breakfast order but selected 'no tip' — the tester
WIRED's Reece Rogers had the AI order breakfast from a bakery; the agent built the order correctly but quietly selected 'no tip.' Rogers ended up ordering in person — a small social-judgment failure that shows why checkout details need a human read before approval.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Plan my whole Seattle weekend - and get the day of my flight wrong
A traveler let the AI make all the major decisions for a Seattle weekend: it sent him toward closed restaurants and an out-of-season salmon run, got a famous cheese shop's opening wrong, and urgently warned him his flight was leaving 'today' when he was booked on tomorrow's daily flight.
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An agent without proper guardrails refunded $8,000 of his orders
An agent he had not yet set up with proper governance or skills refunded $8,000 of orders. It did ask 'You sure?' before acting, but he blanked on the confirmation and approved it. He puts the fault on his own setup more than on the agent.
$8,000one time
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Inbox prioritization 6/10: useful triage but wrongly concluded an email was unsent,
Inbox prioritization scored 6/10: The AI produced a useful view of what needed attention but concluded Diana had not sent an email she had sent — trusting it would have meant a duplicate email to someone already contacted.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
An automatic coding pipeline merged 67 pull requests in two weeks, then he shut it down
A developer let the AI write specs and code while the AI reviewed, all run through GitHub Actions and controlled from Telegram. Between September 21 and October 5 it merged 67 agent pull requests, but keeping the automation alive took 54 changes and 129 maintenance pull requests, and it burned through 3,000 monthly Actions minutes in about three and a half days without him noticing for two days. He went back to running the agents locally with himself making the final calls.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
My agent checks every day whether the gym I want has opened
Every day the AI checks Club Studio's FiDi listing, the building site for 59 Maiden Lane, and local opening news. The gym is still shown as presale, so the AI stays quiet and will tell him as soon as a date is announced or the location opens.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI’s own deploy took staging down, then it refused three times to run the one recovery command he ordered
A team’s staging environment runs on Azure with database migrations at startup. Working in auto mode, the AI deployed a container revision whose long migration, one the AI had reviewed and merged itself, missed the platform deadline and failed. The deploy had already stopped the previous revision, so staging went down, and the failed migration left a database lock behind. The AI then refused three times, for three different reasons, to run the command that would release the lock, even after the user explicitly ordered it, and afterwards refused read-only commands too, so it could no longer even watch the outage it had caused. Recovery fell back to the user.
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The AI ran my side blog and X account for 90 days. It made ¥31 a month.
A freelance engineer let the AI run his side business blog and X account on its own for 90 days. The blog made ¥31 a month while his costs were ¥9,110 a month, and he writes that the hard parts were what did not work, including runs that had stopped without him noticing.
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The AI and the AI got a working prototype of a legacy migration in about 2 weeks
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.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
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.