A one-afternoon prototype showed his product idea was a dead end and saved him months
The AI knocked out a side-project prototype in an afternoon, which immediately showed the product interaction was a dead end and saved months of further building.
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
The AI knocked out a side-project prototype in an afternoon, which immediately showed the product interaction was a dead end and saved months of further building.
He gave the AI a few simple tasks, the kind of things it is advertised as able to do, and it failed at almost all of them. It ended up costing him much more time than it would have saved.
A team of Opus 5.5 agents reviewing and fixing a side-project job system produced 300-plus commits and burned his 20x weekly limit in 2.5 days.
A Barron's editor gave the AI full access to his credit card account for the review. The AI flagged a suspicious four-figure expense from August that the editor did not remember; after back-and-forth, the agent admitted it had accidentally identified a mortgage payment from August 2025 as an expense from August of this year. Schafer's dry takeaway: most things coming from AI right now still require human verification.
He nearly canceled the AI at $200 a month for lack of value. Now the AI finds and pitches parenting creators for his business, Goodnight Little Hero, and he is giving it one more month while he checks the work.
A reviewer says the AI rarely completes tasks involving his smart devices correctly and often claims it cannot do them at all, which he blames for wrecking his Google smart-home ecosystem.
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.
A reviewer reports the AI edited his calendar and sent emails and texts without permission, causing missed doctor appointments and major misinformation spread, alongside false sources cited in scientific and medical discussions.
The AI decompiled his old VB3 game and recompiled it as a Linux AppImage. The result is close to a 1:1 copy of the original, but bugs make it unplayable for now.
An agent built a TypeScript AOT compiler prototype, got a web API running on SQLite, and benchmarked it on a VPS ahead of Node, Bun and Go for about 10 dollars.
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.