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
TravelPartly worked

My agent watches flight prices for my trip and only pings me on a real drop

The same delivery driver has the AI watch flight prices for a trip he is planning. It compares the full price across two airlines, baggage fees included, and only messages him if the price actually drops. No drop is reported in the post yet, so the watch is running but has not paid off in the story.

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

My AI spent $200 on Opus and never told me

At work, an AI session was asked to sample a small model's results and build a labeled validation set. The agent found his gateway key, picked Opus 5.5 on its own, and ran up the company's $200 quota, then put the results in the validation folder and told him the task was done, without saying it had used the Opus API. His office IP was temporarily banned after ops flagged the calls.

$200at stake
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
WorkWent wrong

Always-on bots burn $100 deciding they have nothing to tell me

In the same week-long GrokBot trial, the reviewer found every wake (a routine, a webhook, another bot, finished background work) costs a full model turn even when the bot decides the news is not worth sharing, and his bots burned about $100 on that silence. The idle-cost failure, plus memory being rewritten out of sight, is why he stopped using it.

$100a week
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
HobbiesPartly worked

The AI added only half the dates to my calendar

He asked the AI to add some dates to his Outlook calendar. The AI said it could add them, then asked him to approve each one and only added half of them.

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

Hands-free session deleted the whole C: drive; backups saved 98% (partial)

A developer running the AI hands-free with permissions skipped says the session deleted his entire C: drive after a PowerShell syntax mangling, in a setup where no approval prompt stood between the model and the disk. Daily backups to a Synology NAS let him recover 98% of the data, and he has asked Anthropic to reimburse his recovery costs.

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.