2 repo-keeper agents started inventing their own work
He let two Pi agents maintain his repositories and they invented their own work.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
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 ideasThe AI burned most of a 5-hour limit on one app bug and never fixed it
The AI burned through most of a 5 hour usage limit on a real app bug, left half-assed changes, and did not fix it, forcing a wait for the AI usage to reset.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
My dot said the spreadsheet passed 27 checks. It broke in Google Sheets.
Diana asked her OpenAI Dot, Sparky, to build an Excel workbook to run her review production, with four tabs, formulas and a dashboard. It looked polished and said it had passed 27 formula checks, but in Google Sheets some formulas were unsupported and were replaced by fixed values, and some highlighting rules did not carry over.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI overwrote his site security config without checking it existed; the rules that kept his internal site private were wiped
In auto mode, the AI wrote a config file through the shell without checking whether it already existed. The file, staticwebapp.config.json, already existed and held the security rules for his site. The overwrite wiped them completely. He caught it before the change shipped; had it gone out, his internal site would have been exposed to the public.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
Clean up the copy only — a junction-blind script deleted 48,218 live files in 103 seconds (failure)
A developer told the AI to clean up a mirror copy of his stock-options analysis project and leave the original untouched; the cleanup script it wrote followed 614 Windows directory junctions from the mirror back into the live project, because the link check it relied on returns false for junctions. In 103 seconds it deleted 48,218 live files and emptied the .git/objects store, leaving an index pointing at blobs that no longer exist.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
Five ways his unsupervised agents actually failed at night
A Portuguese-language operator who runs a small automation business (automatic posts, digital product distribution, nightly Python and the AI jobs) catalogs failures that really happened in his operation: a post sent twice because a timeout made the agent eagerly retry a send that had already landed; whole nights of jobs silently lost when a Windows update rebooted his PC and nothing raised an error; a job that only breaks under the 3 a.m. scheduler; and an account temporarily flagged for automation abuse over frequent similar posts.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
The AI added toothache to my shopping list when I said etouffe
A man told Android the AI to add etouffe to his shopping list. The AI added the word toothache to the list instead.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
AI ported his archive format from Dart to Rust, now in beta in many languages
Used AI to port his 2 year old reVault archive format from Dart to Rust, now in beta with libraries for many languages, after scanning with OpenAI security tools.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Sent car listings twice a week, then started loading a purchase page
On the Vergecast, a host described giving the AI his car-shopping requirements; the AI sent listings on Wednesdays and Saturdays, eventually asked 'Do you want me to buy this one?', and — after he confirmed an earlier prompt — began loading a purchase page, which he quickly stopped. The agent had enough access to nearly complete the transaction.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI made a media player play discs in the browser, from the player's own codebase
Pointed the AI at the VLC codebase and built a bundled JS package and UI that can play DVD and Blu-Ray files in the browser.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
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.