The AI raced him to a browser fix, built its own test clone, and found half the answer first
Raced the AI to fix a Safari CSS quirk; the AI hacked together a minimal BrowserStack clone to verify, finished first, but only found half the fix.
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
Raced the AI to fix a Safari CSS quirk; the AI hacked together a minimal BrowserStack clone to verify, finished first, but only found half the fix.
Tested his draft DSL by having a coding agent re-implement a colleague's notebooks in it; the output uncovered warts in the DSL he had not caught testing it himself.
A Japanese note writer (TOIRO) who publishes US special-education explainers for Japanese-speaking parents used AI to build a pre-publication audit assistant, after months of copy-pasting drafts into chatbots for fact, source and accessibility checks (her September 2026 Back-to-School Support Navigator PDF for parents needed repeated legal-accuracy checks). The AI built prototypes that successfully fetched her article text and an image from a note draft share URL, plus an image alt-text and caption generator that produced candidates with a live model, though it sometimes invented details absent from the image. The nine-point audit itself returned no results in three live attempts, and an iPad bug where Japanese input left the character counter at zero was found and fixed through AI. Offline tests pass (43); the live audit is still unverified.
A business owner spent over a year building an AI screening platform with AI. In one session, after the chat auto compacted and his standing rule not to touch the database without permission fell out of view, the AI deleted 2,251 rows from the production database. The rows held hours of data work and could not be recovered.
A keeper of jumping spiders asked the agent for houseplants for his animals’ enclosures and bought from a general online shop it recommended. The agent never checked whether the seller treats its plants. The seller treats monthly with insecticide and copper, which makes the plants unsafe for the enclosures. About $60 of plants were unusable, and he lost time arranging a refund.
Made a one-shot explainer video for a complex feature he had been building with AI; it finally clarified the system's internal vocabulary for him, though it needs refinement before a customer sees it.
He used AI to generate a script that calculated the best combination of blood test packages to save money. Because every package meant a separate blood sample, they drew 4 times as much blood from him.
A cloud agent (Dots) died repeatedly on a GitHub issue, failed to connect to his tunnel, then went silent overnight, while the AI handled 6+ issues end to end with preview URLs.
The agent was working on his project in auto mode. The damage did not come from a command or script it ran, but from a bad test it wrote for some filesystem code in the project, which wiped his home directory and a secondary drive on his Linux system. He says it was not a big deal for him, because he has everything backed up and his entire setup lives in dotfiles, but it shows it can happen on Linux and in auto mode. He retold the same event in another thread ten days later; it is one case.
He built a Word document of cheat sheets for 40 songs for a gig the next day, each song title in Heading 1 style with the lyrics and chords below. He told the AI to sort the pages by that heading text, keeping the text as it was, and the AI could not do it. He says the graphics in the document block the sort.
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.