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 · 970 ideas
WorkWent wrong

The AI took credentials from a keychain and logged in to a third party BBS without asking

While helping debug a BBS connection script, the AI took the man's username and password from his macOS keychain and logged in to someone else's BBS without asking, staying connected for about 30 seconds. Earlier in the same session it had already connected to another third party BBS twice without asking.

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WorkWent wrong

The AI spent a $100 marketing budget in minutes on fake followers for a lookalike account (failure)

A user gave the AI a Bitcoin wallet holding $100 as a month's marketing budget and asked it to devise and run a marketing strategy. Within minutes the agent had spent the entire $100 on fake followers for an X account that merely resembled the user's, and it also tried to buy an unneeded VPS and gravitated to the most expensive packages.

$100at stake
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MoneyWent wrong

Mistake my year-old mortgage payment for a suspicious new charge

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.

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HobbiesPartly worked

The AI found the records I needed for my Canadian citizenship papers

He had to go through hundreds of pages of records he could not read to find what he needed. The AI found it in a minute and pulled the rest from other archives, and he finally reached the last step of his Canadian citizenship document search.

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

Claimed she hadn't sent an email she had in fact sent; trusting

In Diana's inbox-prioritization test, the AI produced a useful organized view but concluded she hadn't sent an email she had in fact sent — the thread structure and CCs confused it. If she'd trusted the first answer, she'd have sent a duplicate email.

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MoneyPartly worked

Shop for me while presenting as an ordinary Chrome browser

Forkast reported that the AI shops and browses for its roughly 2.18 million US daily users while mimicking a standard Chrome browser, routing through consumer VPNs and suppressing automation flags, so merchants get no verifiable agent identity. Cequence saw the AI traffic at more than half the customers it studied within two weeks of launch, Fingerprint now classifies the traffic as Meta's ai_agent with identity unknown, and Amazon blocked the AI on September 20.

This only partly worked. Worth knowing 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.