A man's laptop crashed hard while he was working with the opencode agent. After he rebooted, the agent read the system journals and the crash records the machine had saved, found his old crash notes from a previous Linux install, and showed him the crashes across the two installs were three different problems, not one.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI fixed a bug that would have made him abandon the distro, but the PR was closed by maintainers and he continues running his own fork with the fix.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
AI through tscircuit and OpenAI models designed and autorouted about 15 ordered RP2040 and ESP32 PCB designs; known mistakes include improperly rotated connectors and routing loops.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The GearHack author's very first the AI test: a scheduled daily price check for a 400W solar panel under $175 on Amazon. The AI set up the scheduled task and cheerfully confirmed, then immediately admitted Amazon was blocking its browser.
$175at stake
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A senior engineer keeps a daily devlog file that is only ever added to. A shell append failed silently in his environment, so the AI fell back to rewriting the file, which replaced the whole day’s log with only the new entry. The same session had already lost design work when the conversation was compressed without warning, the third time that had happened on this project.
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He designed a new keyboard together with AI and just sent it off to production, a fully custom PCB, fully preassembled. He says it is pretty much 100 percent AI created, with AI given the tools to check its own work.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
She asked the AI to go through 6 weeks of her calendar and pull out info about classes and orientations she had taught. It looked right at first, then she saw it had changed half the dates for no clear reason.
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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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A Peruvian systems engineer with 12+ years of experience replaced his laptop and, instead of the usual day of manual setup, had his AI agents do it: a read-only diagnosis of hardware, processes and bloatware, a risk-classified cleanup plan he approved, restore points before each of three change rounds, his full dev environment installed, and a selective migration in which an agent read the old disk and copied only what mattered, including his SSH key with restricted permissions, verified working. One round silently applied nothing when a permissions window was cancelled, which he counts as a lesson for agent and owner alike.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.