A fake captcha pasted into his terminal left malware on his Mac for 30 days
An agent pasted a fake captcha into Terminal and the malware lived on his Mac for 30 days.
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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 · 970 ideasBook me a well-reviewed Asian restaurant for 6 p.m. tonight
In PCMag's comparative gauntlet (summarized by WindowsForum), the dinner test asked each agent to find one well-reviewed local Asian restaurant with an open table at 6:00 p.m. that evening. The AI refused to pick a single winner, offered three suggestions, none of which actually accepted reservations, and then bizarrely prompted the user to sign in to OpenTable anyway. Dots found a 6:15 p.m. slot and flagged it as the closest to the request.
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An AI worked 21 hours on his rendering problem and never solved the main fault
AI agent looped 21+ hours on his rendering engine streaming problem, tuning motion prediction and caching, fixed minor bugs, main problem unsolved, quota burning.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Run 57 build jobs on the AI — only 11 finish
Chris Pirillo published a scorecard of 57 build jobs run on the AI 4 (via Antigravity, about $200/month): 11 succeeded, 31 changed nothing, 148 rounds were wasted, and 52 jobs needed the AI to finish them.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
My Raspberry Pi the AI desk buddy never even got on Wi-Fi
The same builder tried the other half of Meta's kit, a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W that was meant to become a battery powered voice announcer. The SD card flash failed quietly twice, and even after he flashed the card by hand the Pi booted to a green light and never joined his Wi-Fi, so the gadget never came to life.
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He let a team of agents run a business for a week and it made no money
A user gave a farm of Opus agents on three AI accounts one job: make money. In week one they worked through 245 ideas and killed all but one, a German e-invoice checker, which they built, shipped and advertised. It drew 68 visitors and 6 real invoice checks and earned nothing. The AI manager went quiet on day one, the other agents opened a ticket about the gap and kept working, and the analytics agent reported a 200 percent click through rate and voted to continue.
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Built a web page in ~40 seconds that she would not use
Web page build scored 5/10: built in ~40 seconds but read like a first-pass concept, noticeably less developed than the AI’s output for the same job — and the finished file was hard to locate (hunting through Goals and Files).
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
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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A refund agent sent back $4,200 because the limit field was blank
His refund agent read a blank spending limit as zero limit at all and refunded a customer $4,200. It took three days of reversal calls to undo.
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Astra and Opus checked his new technique, found the earlier work and ran the experiments
Handed code, data and a writeup to Astra and Opus 5.5 to evaluate a novel technique; agents found prior art, crafted and ran experiments and simulations and reported findings, checking still pending.
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.