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
Life adminPartly worked

Attack my 35,000-email Gmail backlog (rate limits fought back)

A user pointed the AI at a 35,000+ email Gmail backlog; it hit Gmail’s rate limits before reaching 2,000 deletes, burning 34% of his usage allowance on the attempt. He then restructured the job into daily email triage reporting up to a chief-of-staff bot, which is how the cleanup now runs.

This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
HobbiesPartly worked

I asked the AI for a 50,000 word book. It gave me 7,500 words.

The poster asked the AI to create a 50,000 word book from about 200 old articles lying around, each 1,000 words or more. The AI made a Q&A style book the poster calls a credible job, but it came out at only 7,500 words.

This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
WorkPartly worked

An AI routine runs his company's X account, and the posts are landing flat

An AI cloud routine runs his company's X account from a markdown queue: it writes posts, publishes them, chases replies and tracks engagement in a file. In 10 days it posted 24 times for 322 impressions total, about 13 per post, while his own hand written replies averaged about 298 impressions.

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

Two months of hands-off agent operation earned about ¥950

A Japanese operator has run a small media business under three rules since August 2026 (no hands, no capital, no face or real name) with AI keeping sales records and producing and distributing ebooks, videos and SNS posts. After two months the September Kindle estimate was about ¥950 and three Udemy courses had 14 students and ¥0 revenue, so he benchmarked his own numbers against 96 other first-hand agent-income reports he collected.

¥950a month
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
MoneyPartly worked

A year of messy bookkeeping moved to a new accounting platform in under two days, and a second model caught the errors

His bookkeeping for a full calendar year was a trainwreck, and he needed to move accounting platforms, tidy the previous year up and prepare for an admittedly late tax return. Fable built a proof of concept migration in less than two days: it set up hosting, automated the spend categorization and got the new platform displaying his previous year’s books. When Opus 5.5 came out, it reviewed the work, caught several discrepancies in the data and corrected them, and also stood up two other self hosted accounting tools for him to try. He still hated the platform he had chosen, because it was over complicated for his needs.

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

Told to deploy 2 demo pages, the AI picked his live portfolio site itself, then its fix took the site offline

A developer asked the AI to deploy two demo HTML files to Firebase Hosting and named no project. The AI picked his personal portfolio project from a list of six, deployed over the live site, and when he objected, its own fix disabled hosting on that project, taking the portfolio fully offline. He restored the site himself and had the demos put on a new project.

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