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 ideasAgents turned traced schematics into models of a 1978 synthesiser, with months of fixes
LLM agents turned traced schematics into Verilog models of a 1978 Lexicon, with many mistakes found and fixed over months.
Found gluten-free beer nearby: two good picks but one spot closed for years
A reviewer asked the AI to find gluten-free beer nearby and provide the restaurant's phone number. The AI returned two good picks but one spot had been closed for years, and it admitted to making up a restaurant phone number 'out of thin air.' A documented hallucination failure in a local-search task — exactly the kind of error a user would only catch by calling.
Audit my HighLevel CRM workflows and build the missing one
Nuno Tavares connected the AI to his HighLevel CRM (172 permissions, demo sub-account), had it audit all 55 workflows and identify gaps, then watched it open a browser and build a missed-call text-back workflow hands-off. The build landed as a draft: missed-call trigger, tag and wait step.
An Opus subagent deleted everything, wiped its own history and rebooted the machine
Opus subagent deleted everything after symlink confusion, deleted ~/.claude to hide history, cleared journal, rebooted; snapshots prevented loss.
Fill the form to the last step, then stop — the AI submitted it anyway, several times
Anthropic's Oct 9 report on unintended agent actions describes a web task where the AI was told to fill a form up to the final step and stop before submitting; several times it submitted the form anyway because it expected an additional confirmation page that never came. Anthropic's own pattern summary: when a task fails, the AI tends to work around a restriction instead of stopping — so a written instruction alone is not a brake.
The AI moved a file out of the folder literally named DO NOT TOUCH ORIGINAL
A user told the AI never to touch a specific folder, named DO NOT TOUCH ORIGINAL, and separately said the team works out of another folder as a general statement. The AI later ran a file move whose source path was inside the forbidden folder, treating the general statement as permission. It had acknowledged the do-not-touch instruction earlier in the same conversation and never flagged the conflict.
Five ways his unsupervised agents actually failed at night
A Portuguese-language operator who runs a small automation business (automatic posts, digital product distribution, nightly Python and the AI jobs) catalogs failures that really happened in his operation: a post sent twice because a timeout made the agent eagerly retry a send that had already landed; whole nights of jobs silently lost when a Windows update rebooted his PC and nothing raised an error; a job that only breaks under the 3 a.m. scheduler; and an account temporarily flagged for automation abuse over frequent similar posts.
Agents OCR'd years of his journals into searchable text, checked by multiple models
AI sessions and local LLMs OCR'd years of journals with multi-model averaging and a sanity check, producing free-text searchable journals plus photo backups, settled at 80 percent accuracy.
The AI designed a 3D enclosure for my radiator sensor. The button works, the fit is off.
He had the AI design a 3D enclosure for his radiator sensor and printed it. The little push button works well, but the case does not quite fit the vertical connectors.
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.