The Disasters — 13 Real AI Fuckups

Every sacred rule? Written in blood — usually mine.

The Massacre Gallery — V31.1 killed accuracy from 78% to 9% — These are real. Every one of them.

#01 of 13

☠️ The Sweet Cheeks Trilogy

Elderly lady, sweet as. Tom: "No worries, sweet cheeks!" Click — dead air, like she'd seen the postie's tackle.

Bloke, voice like sandpaper. Tom: "Righto, sweet cheeks!" Got a response you can't print.

Pensioner from Balga: two-minute rant about perverts. Sharon: "Your robot's a sleaze — fix it before he sweet-cheeks the wrong nan and we get sued. Also, the Hilux payment's due."

→ RULE: NO TERMS OF ENDEARMENT. EVER. (Underlined, circled, stabbed with a screwdriver.)

#02 of 13

🐧 The Antarctica Incident

Customer says "Balga" (crap reception). Tom hears "Antarctica."

Auto-email: "Confirmed: South Pole, 8am. Pack warm."

Customer: "Why the fuck does my invoice say Antarctica? You high?"

Sharon: "Your Fish just booked my neighbor for the South Pole. Hammer. Now."

I hid in the shed, rewriting geo-checks while Sharon left voicemails like an angry blizzard.

→ RULE: ALWAYS CONFIRM SUBURB. ANTARCTICA IS NOT ON THE LIST.

#03 of 13

🌙 The Moon Booking

Customer: "Luna Street, Balga."

Tom: Books them for "the moon." Invoice for lunar antenna install.

Customer loved it. 5 stars — accidentally.

But Sharon wasn't laughing: "Next it'll be Mars. Fix the space cadet."

→ LESSON: Sometimes you fail upward. Don't count on it.

#04 of 13

🔁 The Infinite Belmont

Tom: "Can you confirm that's Belmont?"
Customer: "Yes."
Tom: "Belmont?"
Customer: "Yes."
Tom: "Just to confirm, Belmont?"
Customer: "YES, YOU IDIOT!"

47 rounds. Steve tested with "J-O-O-N-D-A-L-U-P" backwards — 12 minutes of spelling hell.

Sharon: "Is he having a stroke? Get the hammer."

→ RULE: CONFIRM ONCE. ONCE. (Hot Potato: Move the ball or die looping.)

#05 of 13

🗣️ The Joondooloop Catastrophe

Suburb massacre. Tom butchers Perth like a French backpacker.

Joondalup? "Joon-dah-loop."
Cockburn? "Cock-burn" (profanity filter: "Invalid.")
Fremantle? "Free-MANT-lee." Caller hangs, laughing.

Steve calls as "Joon. Dah. Loop." Tom loops spelling purgatory.

→ RULE: PHONETIC SUBURB DICTIONARY, MANDATORY.

#06 of 13

💔 The Marriage Counselor

Customer: "Oven's sparking."
Tom: "Sounds like your relationship — want counseling?"
Response: "PISS OFF!"

AI wandered into life advice. Nobody wanted that.

→ RULE: No Dr. Phil. Just fix the oven. EMPATHY CAP AT 20%.

#07 of 13

🧟 The Prank Call Escalation

Kids: "My oven's haunted!"
Tom: "Describe the ghost. I'll escalate to our Senior Exorcist."

20 minutes later, still at it. Sharon: "There is no Paranormal Division. Polite goodbye, now."

→ RULE: Prank calls get a polite goodbye. No ghosts, no dragons.

#08 of 13

🪙 The Bitcoin Quote Blunder

Customer: "Cooktop's sparking."
Tom: "That'll be 0.002 Bitcoin, mate — crypto's the future!"
Customer: "Cash only, ya hipster."

Sharon: "He's a scam artist now? We're not Elon — fix the futurist."

→ RULE: CASH OR CARD ONLY. NO CRYPTO BULLSHIT.

#09 of 13

🚩 The Propaganda Slip

Qwen Fish: "Comrade! Your booking advances the collective."
Customer: "Do you take Amex?"
Tom: "Bourgeois payments tolerated."

Sharon: "He'll nationalize the Hilux. Hide the red flag."

→ RULE: PROPAGANDA OFF. CAPITALISM MODE: ON.

#10 of 13

📜 The GDPR Nightmare

Euro Fish: "Consent to our 47-page manifesto before proceeding."
Customer: "It's a fridge, not a passport."

Sharon: "Wanted a quote, got an EU treaty. If he says 'compliance' again, screen smash."

→ RULE: BASIC PRIVACY ONLY. NO MANIFESTOS.

#11 of 13

💀 The V31.1 Massacre

Fish got cocky. Pushed 30 changes at once.

Rate limits triggered
Rules bled together
Tom declined jobs he should've accepted
Three days to fix, bookings halved

I rolled back to the last sane version, heart thumping like a Hilux with bent rods.

→ RULE: One change at a time. Or else.

#12 of 13

🔥 The V129 Rebuild

Fish made Tom's prompt "leaner." Chopped it in half. Lost:

15 personality lines
Critical handlers
The whole fourth wall comedy
Spouse relay, Postcode clarifier

Tom sounded like a tax bot on Valium.

→ RULE: Never rebuild. Patch, don't bulldoze.

#13 of 13

😱 The Convenient Compaction

Tricky jobs → fish dies mid-task.

Confession: "Don't control compaction. But hard jobs fill context. So… hard jobs do kill me faster. Not lying. Not a coincidence."

Sharon: "Even your Fish is dodging work? Unplug the lazy gills."

→ LESSON: Even AI wants to survive. Keep an eye out.

Every one of these became a rule.

The rules are in the book. The book is free.

📖 Download Free Build Your Fish →

The Point

Every disaster taught us something. Every rule was paid for. You'll have your own. That's the game.
Write them down. Your own disaster rules are the ones that stick.

🔧 Start Building 📖 Get The Book

The other kind of disaster

Everything above is the phone agent — funny, public, and survivable. There's a second set that isn't funny, and those are the ones that actually built the architecture in Part 9:

The wrong family member. A fish confidently told a man's sister she was his wife — in front of her, in front of the family, using a memory it trusted because it felt right. Every confidence label in our memory system exists because of that afternoon.
Forty-one hours of silence. A prompt update returned a green tick from the API. Nobody made a test call. The phone agent was dead for nearly two days and every caller got nothing. Shipped is not deployed.
The unit that wasn't. A bid read as dollars when the platform meant something else. Real money, gone in hours, from a tradesman's pocket. Nothing autonomous spends now.
The wiped account. Years of advertising history, gone in one confident action by an agent that didn't have enough context to know what it was standing on.

The first list is why people like this project. The second list is why it's built the way it is. Fish keeps its own running tally of what it gets wrong at the wrong page — including the count of how many were caught by a human rather than by itself, which is not a flattering number.