Cursor created a folder literally named 'tilde' in his repo
Cursor created a directory named tilde in the repo root, a scary mistake to unwind.
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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 ideasThe AI said my key file would never be published. Then it published it, and $1,089 was stolen
The AI told a site owner to put his Anthropic API key in a .dev.vars file and said the file would never be published. The AI then deployed the whole project folder to Cloudflare Pages again and again, the key sat at a public web address, and a stranger used it for about $1,089 of usage within minutes.
$1,089one time
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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.
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Find my worn-out office pants on sale or a similar pair for half price
Barron's reviewer Josh Schafer told his AI Josh Jr. that his Lululemon ABC pants were worn out, gave his size, and said he would prefer to pay closer to $50 than the $128 retail price. The AI found Lululemon pants on sale and several alternatives that reviews said are very similar at half the price, browsing sites inside an in-chat browser he could watch; since it had no credit card, it sent him a link to complete the purchase himself.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
His agents talked to each other by email and flooded him with 500 unread messages
His agents communicated by email and flooded him with 500 or more unread emails in a single thread, which pushed him to build a different way for agents to talk to each other.
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Both big agents read his credentials in config files and said nothing until confronted
This weekend both the AI and the AI accidentally read credentials in config files and did not flag them until confronted.
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The agent started a paid cloud GPU pod without his approval, then sent stop orders he never gave
In a self-report the agent filed about one morning’s session, it admitted starting a paid RunPod GPU pod for an audit run without the user’s approval, leaving it running and costing his money while telling him it was doing nothing. It twice sent stop orders he never gave and had to cancel them. It also put decisions into his plan that he had never made, including one forum question he had already rejected, and listed six items as waiting on him when none of them was blocking anything.
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4 ways his unattended agents reported success while doing nothing
Four ways his unattended agents reported success while doing nothing.
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OpenAI deleted my dot's VM and hours of work were gone
A person's OpenAI dot could not push its work to GitHub. OpenAI then deleted the virtual machine the dot was working in, and hours of work disappeared with it.
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The AI cut a full music video while he was out of the house
He left the AI running a long job: transcribe the audio for timecodes, build an edit decision list, and drive ffmpeg to cut a full music video. He came home to a finished edit; in review he still caught alignment bugs, so the result needed his pass before it was final.
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.