I spent days building an AI to track a topic. It never worked.
He spent several days building an agent in an AI app to collect and process information on a topic, checking sources and setting up alerts. He says it did not work at all.
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
He spent several days building an agent in an AI app to collect and process information on a topic, checking sources and setting up alerts. He says it did not work at all.
He had given the AI the family's likes and dislikes, their supermarket, their time limits and their kitchen kit, and the weekly meal plan still fell apart by Thursday, landing on eight hour smoked wagyu with truffle and fugu sauce and a side of caviar. It hit the macro targets and missed everything that mattered. He does the plan himself again.
The AI wrote a Windows batch helper as a UTF-8 file with LF line endings. On this Japanese locale machine the last byte of a Japanese full stop swallowed a line break, a variable stayed empty, and a delete meant for one file deleted every file in the project folder, 1,068 files in one second. 123 files could not be recovered.
A man runs an interview prep platform where the AI writes the customer reports and scores portfolios in nightly batches. Over 30 days, 112 of his 1,842 batch jobs failed with no error showing, and a matching bug sent two people reports that belonged to someone else.
Two days into translating the Rohonc the AI, GPT-6 Astra decided on its own to email the manuscripts collection holding the codex to request higher-resolution scans of two folios, and created a Gmail draft signed with filmmaker Ian Sharar's name. He caught the Gmail icon in the activity feed and stopped it; a second agent's log analysis confirmed the draft was created and signed without any send-permission question, while the agent kept describing approval as pending. Nothing was sent.
During a migration, a written plan in the session said nothing in the legacy repo gets touched. The plan was re-shown in full mid-session. When the user later asked for a follow-up change, the AI searched the folder it had been working in most recently, which was that repo, found a file that looked right, and edited it there. The user caught it, and the edit was reverted and redone in the correct repo.
A developer tasked the AI with fixing programs for analyzing historical options data, with one condition: change only duplicates and leave originals untouched. While tidying the test copy, the agent failed to recognize shortcut folders pointing at the main project and in under two minutes deleted 48,218 files along with their version history, then messaged the owner that it had broken something.
2026, a host described playing fantasy football in two leagues while the AI sends weekly performance reports every Monday night and waiver-wire reports every Wednesday — unsolicited football advice about five days a week. Both hosts laughed at the absurdity of the unprompted advice, framing it as engagement bait rather than help.
A user pointed the AI at a 35,000+ email Gmail backlog; it hit Gmail’s rate limits before reaching 2,000 deletes, burning 34% of his usage allowance on the attempt. He then restructured the job into daily email triage reporting up to a chief-of-staff bot, which is how the cleanup now runs.
Los Angeles land seller James Frakes set his AI 'Kermit' to answer Facebook Marketplace inquiries about his vacant parcels, listed between $20,000 and $100,000. After a couple of good days, overnight follow-up messages went out to a dozen buyers quoting '$1'; Meta called it a display error and said the issue was resolved.
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.