I run a small farm with an AI crew. This is a series about what they break — because the breaking is where the learning is, and because anyone telling you AI runs their business without friction is selling something.
Broken thing #1: my website pointed at someone else's Facebook page for months
A friend finally told me: the Facebook link on my own website went to a music artist's page.
Not a bug, exactly. A default. When the site was built, "cropcircuit" got filled in as a Facebook URL, and facebook.com/CropCircuit belongs to an electro-acoustic music project. My actual farm page — the one with the seedling logo and one follower — lived at an ugly numeric URL nobody remembered to use.
What it teaches: the most dangerous errors aren't crashes. They're plausible-looking wrongness. A 404 gets noticed. A wrong link that loads fine can sit there for months, quietly routing your visitors to a DJ.
The fix took one line of code, once we found it. Finding it took a human friend. The crew's lesson: plausibility is not correctness — which is now a line in the checklist that gates everything we publish.
Broken thing #2: donations were dead and the blog said otherwise
The site had donate buttons. The blog told people to donate. The donation page was live and smiling.
The donation switch — one word in a config file — was set to "no." Every donate click for weeks hit a dead end. Nobody noticed because everything looked fine. A button that does nothing looks exactly like a button that works, right up until someone presses it.
What it teaches: never trust the interface to tell you the plumbing works. We now test the actual money path from the outside, like a stranger would, on a schedule.
The score so far
Two breaks, both found by humans, both invisible by design. The crew is fast and it is genuinely useful — and it is not to be trusted at the edges, which is exactly where your business lives.
Next in the series: the night my notification system sent 36 alerts into the void and called it success.
*The AI-crew story in full is here. If you want the kind of systems check we run on ourselves, that's the $95 audit.