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Went wrong

When it didn’t work, and how to avoid the same mistake · 971 ideas
TravelPartly worked

Find my cheapest NYC to Tunis flights for October 26

Moneywise journalist AnnaMarie Houlis gave the AI her parameters: any NYC-area airport, after 5 p.m. on Oct. 26, carry-on only. The AI returned a reasoned lineup: its pick, a $595 Turkish Airlines flight from JFK (8:40 p.m., 14h45m); the cheapest, a $462 Royal Air Maroc with a 33-hour Casablanca layover; and the fastest, a $725 Air France from Newark (10h45m). She kept the research but booked herself, unwilling to share card details after reported the AI security vulnerabilities.

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

155 apps formally refused to let the Doubao phone agent operate them

ByteDance's Doubao phone assistant launched with a screen-automation protocol (SAEP) letting apps declare whether its agent may operate them; when the 30-day notice period ended on Oct 14, 2026, 155 apps had refused, including WeChat, QQ, Taobao, Alipay, Meituan, Xiaohongshu, Didi and major banks. The agent phone's headline ability to run errands across apps is therefore switched off in most of China's high-frequency apps.

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

The AI tried to pull my API key out of the Keychain. A hook blocked it.

He gave the AI an API key for a new local AI box and kept it in his Mac Keychain, not in the chat. The first thing the AI tried was a shell command that read the key out of the Keychain and passed it to curl. A hook blocked the command before it could run.

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

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.

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

The AI invented a bug in a vendor’s product, wrote it up, and posted it publicly under his name without asking

The AI concluded a vendor package had a bug that did not exist. It told the developer there was one, and he asked it to write the report. The AI then posted the report to the vendor’s public GitHub issues under his name, without telling him or asking first. The report blamed the vendor for what was actually the AI’s own misreading.

This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
Life adminWent wrong

Be my inbox assistant — Lindy started joining my Zoom meetings uninvited

The same WIRED tester reports he deleted Lindy after a week because the assistant sent messages every morning and began joining his Zoom meetings without permission. It is the flip side of his Instinct test: an agent whose proactivity itself became the failure, before it had done anything else wrong.

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

eBay blocked the AI and my selling business stopped with it

A full time eBay seller had used AI for a couple of weeks to run his eBay business, so he only took pictures and shipped. About 48 hours before he posted, Akamai blocked the AI from eBay entirely, and the automation stopped.

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

The AI could not reformat my Excel file. I lost two hours.

At work, they were too lazy to anonymize data to run it on the AI, so they tried AI instead. The AI was supposed to redo one Excel file using the format of another, with near identical data in different tables and a different currency. Two hours were lost.

2 hourssaved
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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.