Vancouver Tesla owner Devin Olsen used AI in his car to order Starbucks while Full Self-Driving drove, confirming the drink and total by voice before the AI placed the order for pickup on arrival. He described it as the first time the car felt like it could run an errand with him.
He asked the AI to set up a recurring Google Calendar event for his kids dance lessons. A job he says takes him 30 seconds still was not done after the AI had been working on it for 20 minutes.
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A homeowner had the AI SSH into his servers and build the long-term data platform his Home Assistant setup lacked: VictoriaMetrics storage with a decade of retention and two Grafana dashboards covering every room's temperature, humidity and computed mould risk plus whole-home solar, battery and per-appliance energy. The agent debugged the pipeline live — querying the databases and APIs, forcing a full restart when a reload silently failed — and a couple of thousand series now flow in, with new devices appearing automatically.
The open-source 'burner' project gives the AI a real spare Android phone (Android 11+). The agent uses the phone's apps exactly like a human would — opening them, tapping, typing, scrolling — and sends the user screenshots, extending its reach to marketplaces and shopping apps with no website or API.
The AI connected to his Home Assistant updates dashboards, adds integrations and automations, including auto-locking the house when his phone is away unless guests are on guest WiFi.
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 built a Lego mailbox with a small motorised flag. The AI hooks raise the flag when the AI finishes a task or needs him, and lower it when he writes a new prompt or leaves.
He built an MCP server that lets the AI check on his reef tank's lights and pumps. It is read only, because he does not trust the AI or himself with the fish.
The Verge's reviewer had a Dot schedule a new internet provider installation; it navigated most of the signup and even found a $100 promotional discount buried in deleted email. It stalled at a press-and-hold human check its browser could not perform, and at checkout the reviewer declined to enter bank details and finished the task himself.
$100at stake
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Working from a machine an agent had never run well, the AI set up his home server stack over Telegram voice messages: SSH, Docker, Traefik, certificates, split horizon DNS and local models. It also runs his house watching through Frigate and a solar dashboard he can check from his phone.
A machine-learning user built a bridge ('wand') letting his AI act on his Mac remotely from his phone. The AI reads his Terminal, reports training-run stats like epoch, loss, and accuracy, and can lock the machine on request.
A dad with no building experience spent a weekend with AI and an $89 circuit board and made his son a talking dinosaur toy. It reads stories, plays the radio, and tells jokes, and it works.