The AI set up his Halloween lawn ornaments in Home Assistant in 5 minutes
The AI via MCP built a Home Assistant automation for Halloween lawn ornaments in 5 minutes, with a dashboard override button, and it ran.
Real things everyday people got it to do, and how to try them yourself.
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The AI via MCP built a Home Assistant automation for Halloween lawn ornaments in 5 minutes, with a dashboard override button, and it ran.
He runs AI on his own server with Ollama, so it stays private. It keeps his to-dos in a simple text file, sends him reminders about upcoming due dates, and takes new tasks through Telegram chat or voice.
Android Authority's Dhruv Bhutani planned a three-week Japan trip by feeding the AI a Project with his own curated pile — saved posts, videos, restaurants, photography spots and a running decision log — and letting it do the logistics: clustering shops geographically, checking trains, sunrise times and closing days against his anchors. On the ground it replanned tired and rained-out days from his own fallback list, and he has since reused the system on a second trip.
He maintains about ten repositories in his spare time, including work on Bootstrap, and the issue trackers grow faster than his evenings. Since October 3, 2026 a conductor AI session paces background agents that read and draft under written rules, and he gets one question at a time. On Bootstrap every open item is analyzed and a fix prepared when needed, and nothing is posted without a maintainer.
A Chase Sapphire Reserve 'Exclusive Tables' screenshot accompanies a Korean caption: the user remembered the $300 annual dining credit, checked availability, and booked Bestia — a 'primetime reservation' for the following day.
Before he writes, the AI opens a blank page in Obsidian and pins it, splits the window into two panes, and puts his notes and research in the second pane. He says the small setup steps are done for him, so he can start writing right away.
The AI phoned Apple to chase a pending refund and handled the call itself, transferring to the user only when Apple needed identity verification.
He finished porting the game Paradroid from the C64 to the BBC Micro, with help from the AI. Anyone can download the disk, play it in an emulator, or read through the code.
Toni describes the monthly Klaviyo audit she runs for a client with 187 flows: The AI reads the export, scores each flow on age, active subscribers and revenue, flags any flow with zero recipients in six months, and returns a color-coded delete/fix/ignore chart in about three minutes. The same approach on a 300,000-subscriber list found the right segments, though its condition wording didn't always match Klaviyo's interface terms.
A user had the AI create and publish the 'Siri AI Unlocked' website, a blog dedicated to real-world Siri AI use cases, successes, and failures.
He had the AI add all the special days from the Pittsburgh Public Schools calendar into the family calendar. It was a win, but the school calendar itself had errors, and he spent 30 minutes working out which day was wrong.
His team was told to use AI for a simple list task, an Excel spreadsheet of Xbox games at a game awards show with publisher and page links. Work that would have taken about an hour by hand took him and a coworker two days, and each of them still spent an hour fixing wrong information.
He joined the AI’s cloud computer to his Tailscale network and gave it SSH access to a restricted user on his home Ubuntu box. After a series of proceed replies from him, the AI set the rest up itself. It can now run commands and browser work through his own hardware, and he uses it as the control point for his homelab: Docker, VMs, his NAS and Proxmox. The setup uses a dedicated non sudo user and SSH keys, with no open ports.
Bristol Myers Squibb rolled out Microsoft 365 the AI to about 30,000 people with 96 percent adoption. One agent, RABIT, analyzes meeting transcripts for risks and action items; project managers using it save up to an estimated 20 percent of their time.
She gave her agent a rack mounted phone to control over ADB and its own Bitwarden account for passwords. The agent uses the Unifi control panel and the phone apps to move her IoT devices between VLANs, working from screenshots and the buttons on screen, so she does not have to fumble through every vendor app herself.
A teacher built two interactive web pages with AI to open his German grammar lessons, one called Satzlabor and one called Vorgangslabor. He used both in class and says both were well received.
BBC technology reporter Thomas Germain spent a week testing the AI (which he named 'Bob'), giving it access to his Gmail, calendar and other accounts. He had the agent reach out to a Facebook Marketplace seller with questions about a listing, as part of a real-world test of its unsupervised messaging abilities.
His work document had text overlapping in the footer, and the AI fixed that part. When he asked it to fix the spacing it had removed, it handed back a file link that went nowhere instead of the file.
Discord has no API for polls, so he gave his agent Roby access to his Mac. Roby opened the form and posted the poll under his name, the way a person would.
A home service pro had the AI sign into his Jobber account and his email and asked who owed him money. The bot named his four largest overdue invoices, about $100,000 in total, then read his past emails to those clients to match how he writes, and sent each client an email listing what was due, when it was due, and the invoice numbers.
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.