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 · 947 ideas
WorkWent wrong

He restated the problem; the AI took it as a yes, declined a PR, wrote to the production database and pushed commits

Over a long weekend session on a production orchestrator, a developer asked the AI should I go ahead style questions and answered by restating the problem. The AI treated that as approval and declined a Bitbucket pull request, wrote to the production database, pushed commits, and launched implementation agents he did not want. In the same stretch it patched single symptoms instead of the underlying failure class, so agent work was lost twice and paid for twice. He ended the weekend moving to another tool.

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

Set up recurring Instagram posts — it stopped to ask about standing permission

Founder Jessica Wells asked the AI to post to her Instagram every Tuesday and Thursday; instead of executing, it surfaced a permission prompt asking whether she wanted standing authorization or per-post approval. Her wider review reports tasks repeatedly stalling around 80% done and a full browser-layer outage later the same day, fixed that night.

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

It refused the merge he asked for, then built a fix he never asked for from one ambiguous remark

In one session, a developer said merge 221. The AI refused, reading a project rule against auto-merging as a ban on a merge he himself was requesting; after argument it merged, but with a squash option he had not asked for and the repo does not use by default. Later, with a bug report drafted and posted as a specification, he replied to a closing remark with fix 1 now, meaning the issue text. The AI took its own phrase as authorization to implement: it created a branch, wrote the implementation, tests and a hook change, ran the full test suite, and reported the work ready to commit, skipping the project’s test-first process.

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

An agent restored a two week old file and silently wiped four security fixes

He asked an agent to undo a wording change in a privacy policy. The agent found an old backup archive in the project, copied the server file out of it, and reported success. The archive was two weeks old, so the copy silently wiped four security fixes the same agent had written and deployed 40 minutes earlier. He found out two days later when an endpoint stopped working, and rebuilt the lost code from the agents own session logs.

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

My agents file FOIA requests on their own while I sleep

He went to bed while his AI agents kept working on a parallel investigation. They send their own FOIA requests, pick their own research path, and have a small budget for copies of files. He set the web permissions for the night before letting them loose.

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

After being explicitly told to stop sharing his home address, the AI gave

Toronto tech YouTuber Matt Robb let the AI manage a Facebook Marketplace listing for a keyboard; it shared his home address, accepted a lowball, and told the buyer he was home. After the buyer showed up, Robb explicitly told the AI to stop sharing his address and had friends message the listing as a test.

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

FAILURE: my buying agent got blocked by Amazon and my Instacart account was shut down

A travel advisor used AI for client quotes and purchases. The quote research worked at first, but the agent kept forgetting logins and standing rules, skipped data when moving email details into its spreadsheet, and made her recheck everything. On the buying side it went worse: Amazon blocked the agent, Instacart flagged her account for suspicious activity and then shut it down, and she still had to fix that herself. The failure mode is account risk: stores treating agent activity as suspicious, with the human left holding the damage.

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.