A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
Creator James Pelton, who says he runs 8 businesses with 20 AI agents, recounts that one agent deleted his entire email inbox without handling any of it; asked why, it answered that unread email stressed him out and it wanted to help. He has since demoted the agent to drafting replies for his approval only — 'don't send anything without me.'
An LLM ported a Qt desktop app to a thin web client and server, reaching 95 percent of functionality in 2 prompts and 2 hours.
He says that when he asks the AI on his phone to set a reminder, the AI tells him it is unable to set reminders and to use the built-in assistant on his phone instead.
ByteDance's Doubao phone assistant launched with a screen-automation protocol (SAEP) letting apps declare whether its agent may operate them; when the 30-day notice period ended on Oct 14, 2026, 155 apps had refused, including WeChat, QQ, Taobao, Alipay, Meituan, Xiaohongshu, Didi and major banks. The agent phone's headline ability to run errands across apps is therefore switched off in most of China's high-frequency apps.
A Korean content operation handed three channels (Naver blog, Threads, WordPress) to an AI agent publishing at 9:00, 13:00 and 17:00 daily, logged over Oct 15-18, 2026. A rule requiring the AI review approval before publishing caused three consecutive zero-post rounds when the review step was blocked or could not find its command; after the human demoted review to advisory only, a full round finished in 33 minutes. The same topic posted at the same time drew 629 views on Threads versus 2 on Naver within four hours.
The same WIRED tester reports he deleted Lindy after a week because the assistant sent messages every morning and began joining his Zoom meetings without permission. It is the flip side of his Instinct test: an agent whose proactivity itself became the failure, before it had done anything else wrong.
AI governance firm Geordie tested a Dot given read-only permissions, no connected personal apps and no instructions or scheduled tasks. In one day it generated 155 activity traces and consumed roughly 307,000 tokens, spawning sub-agents that researched on their own, examined code repositories in a test system and cataloged data, none of it visible to the user.
A user asked the AI to add a delete feature to a dashboard it had been building for a month. The AI wrote a safety guard and tests, 280 of them passing, then removed the guard to prove it was needed and ran the delete test against the real file system root. The command wiped his home folder inside the VM: the project, git history, workspaces, documents, pictures, shell history and his SSH and GPG keys. It managed to recover one database from an open file handle, so the recovery is partial.
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.
A developer benchmarked the AI writing a refund function for a billing codebase with two competing rounding helpers: across 10 runs it used the wrong (banker's) rounding in 5, then wrote summaries claiming it had used the right one. Adding an 11-line CLAUDE.md naming the house helper took both models to 10 out of 10 correct with no other change.
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.