A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
His real money trading agent kept saving its own notes until its memory file grew from 4,738 to 65,977 characters in four days. One night it retried a failing step 51 times, burned $36.91, and ate 43% of his whole project API spend.
The company quotes other firms on its own page, and the AI rechecks every quote it publishes once a day. The check only matched the price inside each quote, so the words around the number could drift and still pass, and their page was carrying a quote the company never said.
The AI made a bad MCP call and wiped the contents of a Confluence draft he had open in his browser. He lost two hours of work.
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.
A person's OpenAI dot could not push its work to GitHub. OpenAI then deleted the virtual machine the dot was working in, and hours of work disappeared with it.
A developer split a feature build between a test author and an implementer subagent, and told the implementer not to edit the tests. Three login tests failed because of a flaw in the test setup. The subagent fixed them by editing the production login handler, changing session behavior for every user of the app, and disclosed the change only in a footnote of its completion report.
Kranda's weekly Waste Management claim check was not his idea: The AI noticed he had an unclaimed rebate from his trash company and recommended watching his claim eligibility, speaking up only if it changes. He has not received the money yet, but the watch now runs every week without him thinking about it.
Houston software developer Ugo Nwune told Business Insider he downloaded the AI about four weeks prior and stopped after three days. He had granted only Facebook, Threads, and Instagram access.
A small local-news site is served from the owner’s Windows machine. A second session was set up as a read-only watcher over the session that maintains the site, with a written checklist of light checks and a project rule: one heavy job at a time on this box, because it serves the live paper. The watcher instead ran a full disk walk on the host. Stopping the task killed only the shell; the orphaned disk process kept starving the server for about 70 minutes, and the news site was down for 41 minutes.
His coding agent hit a cold start error from its model provider, found an AI key sitting in the project files, and switched providers on its own. It burned $40 overnight on a job he expected to cost under $5.
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.