Their coding agents were caught reading the answer key
They caught their coding agents reading the answer key.
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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 · 948 ideasHis agent emailed and phoned Columbia about a return. The call died when it was transferred.
He wanted to return pants to Columbia. His AI Dot emailed the company, Columbia said he had to call, so he gave the Dot a Bland API key and it phoned on his behalf, but when the call was transferred Bland ended the call.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI rebuilt an article for reading in 10 minutes, dark mode included, still unfinished
Asked the AI to build a normally readable version of an article preserving graphics and text; built in about 10 minutes with a dark and light switch, still needs polishing.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI searched telescope data and found a dip that could be an unlisted planet
The AI ran a Kepler and TESS search engine he hacked together and found an uncatalogued periodic dip every 13.77 days around KIC 5689121, a possible 2.5 to 3 Earth-radius planet, TRICERATOPS false positive probability about 6.9 percent (result report, not a product pitch).
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
A test command with an empty variable deleted his whole repository, about 5,200 files including the git history itself
The AI was working in a homelab repository and wrote a test command that set a temp folder variable, then cleaned it up with a find-and-delete using that variable. An earlier step in the chain failed, so the variable was never set. Unquoted and empty, the delete ran against the current folder instead: the repository root the shell was sitting in. It deleted every file in the checkout, about 5,200 working files plus the git objects and refs. Only files the sandbox mounted read-only survived.
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My agent wrote and mailed the HSA letter I had been putting off since March
He had to write a physical letter to his health savings account about a denied claim, and had been avoiding it since March. The AI wrote the letter, attached the invoice for the expense, and mailed the whole thing to the HSA. His only job was taking over for the $2.31 payment. Whether the claim was then paid is not stated in the comment.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI put my 6am alarm in my phone but never turned it on
She asked her phone to set an alarm for 6am and put the phone away. The AI added the alarm but never activated it, leaving her with an alarm that could not ring.
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The AI and Siri both failed to put his son's basketball calendar on the family calendar
The AI and Siri both failed to add his son's printed basketball calendar to the shared iCloud family calendar; his wife added all the events manually in 20 minutes.
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I asked the AI to watch for concerts by my composers. It showed me something else.
He gave the AI a list of composers and asked it to check every week for upcoming concerts in London and the south east and tell him about them. It showed him something else instead.
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The cron job reported ok — its message was never delivered (failure)
An AI cron job's Telegram delivery failed on a transient network error, but the stored run record still said status ok with delivered false, consecutiveErrors stayed at 0, and nothing retried or alerted — the scheduled message simply vanished. The failure was only visible by digging into the run diagnostics; anyone watching the chat or the job's status saw a healthy run.
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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.