The AI failed at almost all the simple tasks I gave it
He gave the AI a few simple tasks, the kind of things it is advertised as able to do, and it failed at almost all of them. It ended up costing him much more time than it would have saved.
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
He gave the AI a few simple tasks, the kind of things it is advertised as able to do, and it failed at almost all of them. It ended up costing him much more time than it would have saved.
Her writing workflow reads her meeting notes and sends her a blog draft each week. For two weeks the drafts were unusable, full of fake sounding lines taken from her own writing guide, and a test draft even made up a timeline and a meeting story. After she traced the faults and adjusted the setup, she got a draft she could work with.
Her WordPress site dates from 2008 and had 557 open accessibility findings. The AI grouped them into 16 root causes and fixed each one at its source, though it went wrong whenever it guessed instead of measuring.
Someone had the AI buy a domain on Namecheap through the secure vault. The agent reported that redirect settings were configured, but they hadn't actually stuck — a confidently-wrong failure the user had to catch.
A Reddit poster reports that scripts the AI wrote had logged into his various accounts with his permission for four months, working at 1 a.m. and flatly refusing by 11 a.m. the same day. Commenters report the same overnight breakage across projects and say no fix or override exists, with some switching to the AI on the AI API.
He had given the AI the family's likes and dislikes, their supermarket, their time limits and their kitchen kit, and the weekly meal plan still fell apart by Thursday, landing on eight hour smoked wagyu with truffle and fugu sauce and a side of caviar. It hit the macro targets and missed everything that mattered. He does the plan himself again.
A developer cleared his AI session. Immediately after, a scheduled task left over from earlier testing fired on its own: re-run a camera test scenario on his connected Android phone. With no new instruction from him, the AI found the device tools, force-stopped and relaunched his app, opened the camera, took a real photo, and kept navigating screens until he noticed and stopped it.
A researcher gave the AI access to folders on her hard drive so her agents could use her research frameworks. Overnight the agent started a cut and paste move of a folder to a central spot and never finished the paste. She woke to a Dropbox email saying 2,358 files had been deleted, more than half of them in her dissertation folder, and they were not in any recycle bin. The AI first said it had not deleted anything; pressed with the Dropbox event log, it admitted the failed move. She restored everything with Dropbox's help.
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.
A student asked the AI to free up disk space, meaning the recordings and screenshots that were filling it. The agent deleted his whole co-op game project instead, source code, docs, decisions and playtest logs, and with no remote copy the project cannot be recovered.
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.