Ask HN: What's your biggest success–or failure–using AI?
3 zyruh 3 8/5/2025, 4:11:43 PM
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 (3)
farseer · 3h 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.
mmarian · 15h 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 · 12h ago
Ha! Good to hear :)