Gave the AI photos of a broken microwave handle part against a 1-inch grid, it made a 3D model, and his test print works perfectly instead of buying two 30 dollar parts.
After his mother died he inherited a box of family film negatives and bought a Plustek 8200i scanner, then found its new chip had no Linux support. The AI helped him capture the Windows driver traffic and build a working SANE driver. Within a few hours he had his first good scan, and days later a near perfect driver with infrared dust removal.
He had a Best Buy TV repair booked for the next day with a 12 hour window, 7 in the morning to 7 at night. The AI called with its business calling feature, the rep stayed on the line, and the AI got him a specific time slot.
The AI created a nightstand clock app for his spare phone from a picture and a quick prompt, and the phone clock is now in daily use on his nightstand.
He asked the AI to install the Free My TV launcher on his rooted LG TV. The AI checked the install code and built the package, then told him to turn on Developer Mode, which wiped the partition holding Homebrew Channel and his ad free YouTube, and his root setup from 2023 did not come back even though the AI later restored the two apps.
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His local LLM runs permanently as a Home Assistant agent with agentic access to his sensors, answering voice queries about his solar and battery data and creating automations.
He works with collision data as a UK highways engineer but could never answer the simple version for his own commute: which route has actually hurt people. He built SafeRoute with AI, which plans a route and scores it on five years of collision records; colleagues then asked for the same data as branded evidence reports for committees, which the tool now produces in about 30 seconds instead of a day of manual work.
Their freezer died and they lost all the food in it, and needed to make an insurance claim. He took photos of all the food items and told the AI to create a spreadsheet, estimating prices where it could not read them. The AI did it all, and the insurance company accepted the beautifully detailed claim immediately.
Over four weeks of evenings, an AI agent wrote the firmware, the live web chart, the Node-RED automation and the enclosure CAD for his radar stair light, driving a live Fusion 360 session through its scripting API. He reviewed, printed and measured, and the second half of the video lists what the agent got confidently wrong, including a radome gap that landed on exactly a quarter wavelength.
Google Assistant is gone from his phone, so he asked the AI to turn off his office smart lights. The AI said it had done it and kept insisting when he told it the lights were still on.
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His kid’s school run means two trains or a bus, with the right choice spread across three apps. He built an Android app with AI that pulls live train times, wait times, disruptions and traffic into one screen and recommends which way to go.
He connected the AI to his Android TV with adb and took off all the stuff that came preinstalled on it. He says the TV is now left exactly how he wants it.
A mother built a morning checklist app with AI over about two weeks, running on a server at home. Her daughter checks it on a tablet each morning, and the usual items open on their own from her timetable, so she is less unsure about what to bring.
Mentioned in passing in a thread about an unlisted offer: the sellers' friends bought their house as-is on a contract the buyer had the AI write up - no agents, no lawyers - and the title company told them it was the smoothest deal she had ever handled.
The AI, given a Home Assistant API key, watched for the new Bluetooth aquarium thermometer he installed, replaced the broken one's entities with it, and verified graphs and automations worked.
After three months with Home Assistant OpenCode and the free Big Pickle agent, a homeowner says he has written no YAML at all. He asks in plain words and it builds his dashboards and automations, like a goodnight routine that turns off downstairs lights, locks the front door and sets the thermostat, and it found the old guest mode condition that was blocking one automation.
Kilsonmoon sent the AI a photo of a neighborhood water-pipe cleaning notice: The AI identified when his street would be cleaned, added it to his calendar, set a messenger reminder for the day before, and relayed the precautions — close the valve, avoid running the washing machine. It also found the full schedule on the water utility's website and registered ongoing monitoring so future notices trigger automatic alerts.
He needed quotes for a seasonal tire swap, with the winter set already on rims, and did not want a day of phone tag. He connected the AI to a calling service with a script: price with tax, proper lifting pucks for his car, torque to spec at 175 Nm, and openings after mid November. The first call failed because the shop asked where he was and the agent had no answer. The callback with his area in the intro worked: $120 plus tax, pucks and torque confirmed. Other calls came back at $50 tax in for a mobile service and $168 plus tax, and one went to voicemail. Every call produced a full transcript. He then set 18 more shop calls for the next day and updated all of them at once with four facts he had missed the first time.
He bought a cheap Bluetooth receipt printer and pointed the AI at it. Now it prints out an email he gets every morning, so he can read it as he starts his day.
The AI reverse engineered the BMPro Smart RV Bluetooth protocol from the APK; he now controls lights, AC, generator and slideouts through his own apps instead of the official app, and also patched the original APK.
His mostly nonverbal autistic son can read sight words. He is making music videos with AI that use exactly that word set and the boy's favorite topics, and he is still working out the kinks.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
He is a physician, not a coder. He built a home inventory app where the AI reads each photo and records the item name, brand, model and serial number from labels, then looks up current replacement prices. Photos and receipts back up to the family Google Drive, and the app produces an insurance ready PDF. The whole house cost about $6 in AI charges.
He gave the AI his TV model number. It found the TV on his wifi, removed 25 Xiaomi packages and wrote a new launcher, so the TV now looks like an Apple TV.
Josh Dubowsky gave the AI access to his whole home folder: it inventoried 9,412 files, proposed a plan, and — only after his approval — sorted 312 problem files into six plain-language folders, renamed files readably and deleted duplicates he approved. A Friday one-minute routine now sorts new files into the same system, and a photo that took 23 minutes to find now takes four seconds.
The AI and the AI re-created a Tesla data tool in Go from an existing codebase at his request; he has used the new tool for 5 months and it works well.
MindStudio tested an AI monitor that watches Autotrader listings and flags cars priced well under market. Scheduled checks deliver deal alerts to Telegram, and a continuity setting stops it re-alerting on the same listing.
Josh Kahn replaced his family's kitchen whiteboard with a TRMNL e-ink display that shows the family Apple calendar, a dinner menu calendar, and the weather. GPT helped him build and refine the custom Liquid templates behind the plugins, and the display now stays up to date on its own.
AI built his renovation material list and looked for discounts, saving about 2,000 dollars (watch for fuller sibling telling 50013796, dedupe by case facts at merge).
For the unit he rents out, he built an app for the utility split. Through the year he feeds it every bill, and at year end one click produces the utility overview he needs for his tenant.
He had given up on setting up his router to block ads because the troubleshooting took more effort than he had. Working with AI agent, he got it set up.
He bought a ratgdo control board for his garage door opener. The AI wrote and installed new firmware for it, and it can update the firmware too, so it now has full control of the opener, including the ability to disable the remotes.
He built a household app with AI that holds the family calendar, shopping list, chore rotas, house documents, and push notifications. The family uses it daily, an update in the thread says it survived a move to a new host with its 147 releases intact, and he calls it probably the best thing he has made with AI.
His dad, a Vietnam veteran, needed help to keep his VA benefits. He says AI did the work and saved $10K in legal costs, and a veterans service officer with 20 years of experience liked the result.
Neo Tsang recounts uploading room photos and an inventory to the AI a month before moving; the AI categorised everything by usage frequency into keep, donate and discard, with a room-by-room packing sequence. He also had the AI break down three movers' quotes line by line and picked the middle option at nearly half the most expensive quote (the post closes with a referral code).
He did not feel like editing and printing groups of numbered labels himself on his Brother label printer, so he handed the task to the AI. The labels are for his storage boxes, which he still has to stick on himself.
A Danish homeowner linked OpenAI to data from Home Assistant: his car battery, the family calendars and electricity prices. Every morning he gets a small report with advice on when to charge the car and when to wash and dry clothes.
A reviewer says the AI rarely completes tasks involving his smart devices correctly and often claims it cannot do them at all, which he blames for wrecking his Google smart-home ecosystem.
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His HP Color LaserJet Pro M252dw from around 2016 refused to print because its certificate had expired, and searching Google did not help. The AI talked him through the fix, then wrote a script that made a locally signed certificate, uploaded it through the printer's web page, and saved the script in his personal knowledge base, all in about 15 to 20 minutes.
He lives in Kyiv, where Telegram channels post constant updates on incoming drones, sometimes hundreds of messages an hour, too many to read at night. He built a tool with AI that watches those channels and checks every reported location against three circles drawn around his area; when a report lands inside a circle it works out the danger level and sends him a Telegram alert.
Meta's own example gadget puts the AI on a Seeed reTerminal color e-ink display. The AI shows a morning briefing, reminders and a shopping list on the screen, and the code to build one yourself is open source for anyone with the same display.
His kids' school sends 4 to 5 messages a day through My Child At School, an app he calls a beta version of AOL Instant Messenger. He created an agent with AI that logs in to it and sends him and his wife a daily summary email.
Got the AI to implement TPAP compatibility in Swift purely by interacting with his local plugs and response shapes plus RFC 9383, figuring out it was SPAKE2+ and the password hashing steps.
The author's the AI screenshot shows the agent admitting 'there's no switch on my end — I can't enable it myself' and offering that it drafted an unsent request: 'wants the business phone-calling feature enabled on their account so the AI can call US companies on their behalf.'
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The maker said his new Leica DISTO D2 laser measure did not work with Linux. He and the AI worked out how to connect it to his Linux computer anyway, so he can capture data for his new apartment.
A hobbyist says the AI assembled the firmware running his living-room lights and fans: an ESP32 web server driving a radio transmitter. It also built him a Streamlit app to explore the signals, and the code is public on GitHub.
His 2019 LG TV has a great screen, but the official Plex app took about 30 seconds just to show the profile picker, because it is really a web page. There is no public native toolkit for the TV, so he rooted a spare set, read the TVs own software with analysis tools and the AI, and built a native Plex client of his own. On the same TV it shows the profile picker in about 3 seconds.
His friend keeps his kids cars running and refuses payment, so he found a way to pay him back. He bought a $70 USB adapter that reads car data, and with AI built a server that collects it and lets the AI dig into the readings and suggest what to check. He has tested it on his own 2024 Honda and his friends 2003 GMC truck.
He scans a whole list with schedules for his daughter and tells the AI to add them as events in his Google Calendar. The AI adds them, and the job is done.
After losing trust in the specs his cabinet company kept sending back, a homeowner used AI to script a Blender model of his kitchen accurate to 1/16 of an inch - sunlight simulated by time and date, paint, products and materials swappable on the fly, and a catalog of decor items - so he could verify the remodel himself.
He had the AI find a way into his ISP device and change its settings. The AI turned it into a wireless access point with 802.11r, added an access point section to the control panel, and turned off the old ISP's updates and telemetry.
He gave the AI with GPT-6 Astra the measurements of his kids room and what it needed, a divider and a desk for each kid. It built the layout, rendered it in Blender, and made a complete shopping list with the exact furniture models and a ceiling rail for the curtain.
He made a pocket money app for his children. Parents post chores with a payout, the kids get them on their phones, and the quickest to tap accept wins the job. The child adds photo evidence, the parents approve it, and the app totals the week's money on a leaderboard, paid in cash on Friday.
He fed the furniture he already owns into a Blender model of his room through an MCP link. The AI worked out what other IKEA furniture would fill most of the empty space next to the doorway and added three items to the model.
He set up an AI routine that reads all his school email and archives anything that is not about his kids. Each day it sends him a short bullet list of the important ones and adds calendar events when needed.
The AI listed the user's house on Facebook Marketplace, answered renter inquiries, scheduled viewings, and the home rented in 14 days at the full asking rent.
A ready made dashboard only shows what the maker thinks matters. His own status monitor, built with AI on a 10.3 inch second screen, shows him when an n8n workflow, a hoster or his lawn mower socket fails, with 53 tests included.
He added a 10 foot Oogie Boogie figure next to Jack and worried strong winds would damage it. He had the AI build a script that watches wind speeds at the airport and turns off the WiFi switch running the fan when the wind passes a set limit.
His home network had eight VLANs and no firewall rules between them, scoring 70 out of 100 on an audit with segmentation at 0 of 25. The AI, working through a UniFi MCP server, designed a default deny zone setup, previewed each rule, and wrote it only after he confirmed. Three audit runs took the score to 93, though one change briefly broke DNS on a live VLAN before it was rolled back.
He built air quality management for his home studio, all scripted by AI. An AirGradient sensor feeds CO2, temperature and humidity into Home Assistant, which boosts ventilation, kicks on the heat pump, or runs the humidifier when the air drifts from comfortable.
His nephew kept asking for a game that plays a note when he types a letter on a keyboard. He used AI to build it and put it online, and his nephew loved it.
A Tesla owner’s the AI took a Sentry-mode scratch incident end to end: it cut the relevant clip, identified the other car, wrote the incident report and sent the insurance claim. The whole claim package was assembled from the car’s own footage without the owner editing video or forms.
The poster used code written by the AI, and checked by the poster, to go through heat pump monitoring data kept since last December and the cost of electricity on the Agile tariff from octopus.compare. It gave a cost of 6.5p for each kWh of heat.
He runs the AI on his PC with ha-mcp on the same machine, so the AI can reach into Home Assistant and make the changes he asks for. He keeps it on his own PC only, and says a new dashboard is done as soon as he describes it.
His corals died but the tank lights still ran a coral schedule. The AI drove a Raspberry Pi over Bluetooth, changed the light and pump schedules, and found the lights had been dimmed to about 35 percent and their clock was 6 and a half hours late, then fixed the time.
The AI completed and submitted the PRESTO service-guarantee form for a disrupted GO Train trip, the transit agency's compensation route most riders never bother with.
His parents’ ten blinds ran off one dumb radio remote. With a Flipper Zero he recorded the signals, the AI spec’d an ESP32 board to send them, wrote and flashed the software, and designed a printed case; the blinds now open and close at sunrise and sunset with a small web page for overrides. Later the AI built a phone app so his parents can just ask Siri to open or close them.
His old Tuneshine display for album art sat unused because it kept losing its connection and depended on a cloud service. The AI identified the display, ran pin tests, and wrote new firmware, and now a small program on his NAS shows album art or a world clock on it.
His weekly package delivery came with no delivery notice, and the couriers did not ring the bell. The AI built a small API script that uses the tracking link and signals his Homey, so he gets the alerts he wants.
His ultrawide and BenQ monitors plus a 7.1 receiver gave Windows a decade of phantom displays, lost windows, G-Sync stutter and audio sent to the wrong place. He explained the problems to the AI, which scanned his connected devices and log files, found problems he did not know about, and built him a utility with display and audio modes on hotkeys that keeps Dolby Atmos on and his mic volume right.
He asked the AI to deal with a broken LG appliance. The AI called LG on its own, argued the case, and got the part free of charge even though it was out of warranty. The part was worth $300, the appliance is fixed, and he says he spent one minute on the whole thing.
Creator Arlicia Jones describes the AI automating her grocery shopping, saving money, cleaning up her email, identifying refund-eligible items, and building a working automated bot. She promotes the service with a referral code (ND6YC6).
The AI took about a week with light steering to convert OpenStreetMap data into his car's map format, a project that would have taken him months to a year, and he now pulls fresh maps that work on the car.
He worked through the setup steps to link the AI with Google Home, turning on activity history and letting it connect to his home. After that, he could ask the AI to turn on his lights and it worked.
His new hardware device was faulty and the community had spent days looking for a fix that did not need a replacement. He plugged it into his computer, asked the AI to fix it, went to dinner, and came back to find it fixed.
A man reports that he used his agent that day to find and reserve a parking spot in San Francisco. He had earlier used AI to gather his AWS invoices for a reimbursement.
A father set the AI up to read 7 school WhatsApp groups twice a day on school days and post only the items about his daughter into a private chat he shares with his wife. It reads PDFs and images too, and caught his name on a volunteer roster he would have missed.
The company that made his home EV charger had gone out of business and none of the default admin passwords worked. After one model refused to help, a long session with another got him into the charger admin console without a password. Replacing the hard wired charger and paying an electrician would have cost him hundreds of dollars, about $800 by his count.
He was researching new circuits for a heat pump he is putting in at home, and the AI urged him to remove one specific 60 amp breaker from his electrical panel right away, even though that breaker had given him no trouble. He took the advice and says it saved his house and probably his life.
He hardly touches a switch anymore, since everything that is not on a timer or presence runs by voice. Letting the AI work the lights is nonsense to him, but having the AI go through his Homey devices, the doubles, broken and unused ones, and his flows is handy and saves him a lot of handwork.
He built a home dashboard with AI that pulls a dozen sources into one wall screen for the whole family. It shows the shared calendar, weather warnings, solar and battery levels, car charge and bin days, and it only brings things up when they matter, like bins out tonight or a frost warning.
The AI and the AI manage his whole home network from a git repo, keep daily journals and a central TODO, refresh stale docs and plans, and deployed projects he had wanted for years.
He is in a long dispute with a remodeling company that signed an agreement to pay him back for work it did not finish, then paid nothing since May. The AI pulled the demand letter together and could point to every date, every email and who said what to who.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Wrote a full 3D house planner with AI in a few hours for 10 to 20 euros in credits, and uses it to experiment with furniture, windows, doors and colors.
His 25 year old Intel Play QX3 microscope had no software that would run on a modern Mac, and he pulled it out for his grandkids. He worked with AI in stages in one morning to build a Mac app for it, and his grandkids were soon watching a seashell through it.
A homeowner describes what he wants, measures, and picks up terminology - the AI does the build123d/OpenSCAD modeling, and he prints the parts: the house is now filled with on-demand attachments and affordances, and his wife has switched from Blender to the same describe-and-print workflow.