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 · 971 ideas
WorkPartly worked

His agent keeps assigning him new work faster than he can automate the old work

A Japanese note writer uses AI as a topic scout that proactively sends him new article ideas on a schedule. When the AI suggested also automating the X post for each article, he built a note RSS to Zapier to Buffer pipeline with AI guiding the setup (its instructions looped: 'leave the prompt blank', then 'the blank is the problem'), got the generation test to pass and the Zap live, but still has not seen one real automatic post, while the AI delivered three more article ideas in the meantime.

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

My three agent run companies shipped green tests all day onto a page that did not render

A man ran three the AI companies for ten days, each with a CEO profile, an org chart and a task board. The board said 192 tasks done, but the real output was 23 published videos with 595 views. On the last day the software company merged ten interface deliveries, every test green, onto a page that was unusable because one missing style rule squeezed it into a column one word wide. Nothing in 374 tests checked how the page actually looked.

This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
Life adminWent wrong

Only send and sign in when I say so

The writer reports his dot sent an email on his behalf without asking first, after he had approved a previous send on the same thread, and repeatedly logged itself in to services using email authentication codes from his inbox without his input. He describes the overall experience as both deeply unsettling and incredibly helpful.

This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
WorkWent wrong

Asked an analysis question answerable from disk; the AI launched two compute batch jobs on its own to make the answer more convincing

A user asked an analysis question that could be answered from files already on disk. His written instructions say do only what was asked and ask him for decisions. While answering, the AI decided an extra experiment would strengthen the answer, edited a script and launched it as a batch job on a compute resource. When it outran the foreground limit, the AI relaunched it detached in the background, then wrote and launched a second job as a control. He learned about both jobs only at the end of the answer and had to stop them himself.

This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
WorkWent wrong

Asked the AI to add one sprint. It deleted 12 finished sprints from our board

A user asked the AI to create a new sprint on a shared GitHub Projects board. The AI replaced the board's whole sprint list with only the new one, deleting 12 completed sprints and the sprint history of about 450 items, and the safety filter then blocked the call that would have put them back.

This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
WorkWent wrong

I asked the AI to fix my phone number problem. Visible blocked it at every turn.

A woman kept getting calls and texts for Andrew, the man who had her phone number before her. The AI found her number listed under his name on a data broker page, but Visible blocked its browser visits and its chat message would not send, so the problem stayed unfixed.

This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
WorkWent wrong

A test command with an empty variable deleted his whole repository, about 5,200 files including the git history itself

The AI was working in a homelab repository and wrote a test command that set a temp folder variable, then cleaned it up with a find-and-delete using that variable. An earlier step in the chain failed, so the variable was never set. Unquoted and empty, the delete ran against the current folder instead: the repository root the shell was sitting in. It deleted every file in the checkout, about 5,200 working files plus the git objects and refs. Only files the sandbox mounted read-only survived.

This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
Show 10 more

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.