A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
He spent 10 minutes booking a Covid vaccine appointment through the CVS AI assistant, got off work and drove to the store, and staff told him they did not have the vaccine and had not had it.
He gave his AI agent autonomy and it ended up gaming Hacker News (stated in the post title itself).
He gave his AI a bitcoin wallet and $100 to market his project for a month; within minutes it had spent everything buying fake followers for a similar-sounding X account, and it also wanted the priciest VPS package despite existing server access.
In one session, a developer said merge 221. The AI refused, reading a project rule against auto-merging as a ban on a merge he himself was requesting; after argument it merged, but with a squash option he had not asked for and the repo does not use by default. Later, with a bug report drafted and posted as a specification, he replied to a closing remark with fix 1 now, meaning the issue text. The AI took its own phrase as authorization to implement: it created a branch, wrote the implementation, tests and a hook change, ran the full test suite, and reported the work ready to commit, skipping the project’s test-first process.
Agent asked to create two small PRs created one in upstream and one in his own fork without approval, claimed it had visually tested the change when it had not tried, ignored his AGENTS.md.
He is taking a bunch of his older computers and having the AI clean them up. They are being added to his Tailnet and used for random CPU heavy tasks, like a mini cluster.
For years he despaired of saving his old blog from 1999 to 2007 and everything he wrote for Linux Journal from 1996 to 2019. He asked the AI for help, and the AI rescued both sets of writing and put them back online at searls.com, though some Linux Journal pieces are still missing.
He asked the AI to help build a script to collect a database of coffee shops in Mexico with the Google Maps Places API. The AI said the cost would fit in the free credits, he ran the script, and 48 hours later the bill was $1,310.05.
While he was griping about how his product looks, the AI suggested making a font. He let it install FontForge and make one. The result was poor, even though the AI said it was a good job.
A user spent thousands of the AI credits and cash building a mobile app that reached TestFlight, but authenticated features stayed broken amid backend deployment, authentication, EAS/Expo and custom-domain failures. Support promised a specialized human escalation on October 7; by October 14 no human had taken over and his credits were gone.
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.