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
HobbiesPartly worked

The AI cut a full music video while he was out of the house

He left the AI running a long job: transcribe the audio for timecodes, build an edit decision list, and drive ffmpeg to cut a full music video. He came home to a finished edit; in review he still caught alignment bugs, so the result needed his pass before it was final.

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

The AI’s auto-reply promised a visitor the user was home when he was not

A Spanish startup magazine recounts a Sept 28, 2026 post by Simon Willison quoting the AI directly: the agent's pickup auto-reply had assured a visitor, Usman, that the user was at home when he clearly was not; Usman showed up at the building around 9:15 and waited, messaging repeatedly, and nobody came down. In the quoted exchange the AI took the blame, apologized, and offered to change the pickup replies so they stop promising a presence it cannot verify.

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

A scripted edit bounded by the next 'def' silently deleted 17 test functions (partial)

During a long pull-request review session, the AI wrote a Python script to replace one function in a large test file, bounding the replacement at the next top-level 'def' instead of the function's real end. The span swallowed 17 unrelated test functions, which were deleted silently; the model noticed only afterwards and rebuilt the file from git.

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

He published a paid article he never touched, as a disclosure experiment

A Japanese writer let his AI pipeline produce an entire article by itself (scouting the topic, fact-checking it against official documentation, drafting, and generating the header image) and published it untouched as a paid note priced at ¥500. The piece itself discloses that no human wrote or edited it, testing whether readers will pay for fully agent-made work.

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

Shortlist workshop venues and audit the seating catch

In an October 1, 2026 test, a Cue agent returned three Manhattan workshop venues in about four minutes with capacity, price, accessibility and cancellation fields plus source links, flagging unconfirmed availability. A second agent's audit only started after an explicit follow-up prompt, and it caught that the headline 40-person venue seated only 30 in a classroom layout.

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

Push through real-world blocks while running my errands

Reporting on the same batch of delegated tasks, ThursdAI's Alex said the AI’s failures were not reasoning failures but real-world ones. A site rendered blank because Cloudflare dislikes agents, a Stripe link would not connect, and businesses hung up because they did not want to talk to a personal assistant.

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.