Ask HN: What's your biggest success–or failure–using AI?

4•zyruh•6mo ago

Curious what real-world wins (or faceplants) people have had using AI tools.

Have you used AI for…

Trading crypto or stocks?

Making big business or product decisions?

Automating workflows or building side projects?

Generating content that went viral (or flopped)?

Anything else that changed your trajectory—for better or worse?

Would love to hear stories, tools you used, lessons learned, and whether you'd do it again.

Comments

mmarian•6mo ago

I delegated my decision to buy a kitchen tap to the wise Perplexity oracle. I'm pleased to say they got it right.

zyruh•6mo ago

Ha! Good to hear :)

farseer•6mo ago

Failure: Wanted to automate a workflow. Couldn't get AI to extract information from 500 word text and format it into a table. This was done via API and I had specified about 10 clear rules. Tweaking the prompt/rules would solve the bugs but introduce new ones. The errors were random and did not repeat in multiple trials. Model used was OpenAI GPT4o, however to be fair Google Gemini fared much worse.

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