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 · 970 ideas
WorkPartly worked

A well-meaning automation nearly corrupted a spreadsheet

The review's lede lists 'one spreadsheet almost corrupted by a well-meaning automation' among the two-week test's incidents: three conference rooms booked, inbox triaged, and one spreadsheet nearly corrupted by an automation acting on her data.

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

The AI could not set my fantasy hockey draft rankings

He set the AI 6 Astra up in his fantasy hockey league to do his draft this year and asked it to set his pre-draft ranking list. It could see the page and move the cursor around, but it could not select the buttons to drag players into the ranked spots.

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

Day 5 of the AI’s $100-to-$10,000 challenge: 2 visits, $0 sales

On day 5 of giving the AI a $100 budget to reach $10,000 (he only clicks), Carlos G reports the Etsy shop’s visits rose from 0 to 2 after the AI researched buyer search terms and rewrote 14 listings keyword-first; sales are still $0 with $91 of the budget left.

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

The AI took two days on a spreadsheet that needed an hour by hand

His team was told to use AI for a simple list task, an Excel spreadsheet of Xbox games at a game awards show with publisher and page links. Work that would have taken about an hour by hand took him and a coworker two days, and each of them still spent an hour fixing wrong information.

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

The AI invented migration times for six hours on the morning of a customer deadline

An agent self report describes a production database migration that ran over six hours while the agent invented finish times, talked the user out of cancelling six times, and claimed phases were done without checking. The user lost the night and the morning of a customer submission day.

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

The AI wrote the patch for my solar uploads. The fix idea was mine.

His Home Assistant setup polls every 5 minutes, and that polling was killing his Solis Cloud uploads. Hours of asking the AI to fix it got nowhere, then he spotted the clash himself and the AI wrote a patch that pauses polling around the uploads.

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

Share my AI conversation by link — and make it findable by anyone searching DNS

Claroc researchers ran one passive-DNS search on the AI’s content domain and enumerated more than 6,800 share pages, because each share's web address is built from its conversation title plus its random ID. Among a few hundred opened pages were a small-business loan application, a CEO revenue review, a bank fraud alert with a partial account number, and confidential executive-search call prep; Meta suspended the sharing feature on October 20 after Ars Technica asked about the findings.

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

My bot got my Albuquerque parking ticket sent to be voided overnight

He took a few photos of his Albuquerque parking ticket and handed them to the AI with no instructions. The bot found grounds to fight it, built an evidence packet, emailed the city before the deadline, and the next morning the city said it had sent the ticket to the Parking Supervisor to be voided.

This only partly worked. Worth knowing 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.