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Your place, your car and your pets · 265 ideas

Order my Starbucks by voice while the car drives itself

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.

Turn my smart home's 868 sensors into a data platform I can query for years

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.

Set up a spare Android phone as the agent's own device: The AI

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.

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Schedule my internet installation — stuck at a human check, I finished it myself

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.

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My agent called tire shops for swap quotes and brought back transcripts

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.

I stopped writing YAML. My home agent builds my automations now.

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 rebuilt his parents’ blind controls so the house opens and closes itself with the sun

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.

Set up a 'wand' bridge so the AI can act on his Mac

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.

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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.