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 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 smart home user had the AI create a vector floorplan of his house, then write a small tool where he could drag icons for his lights and fans into place. He set it up in Home Assistant so he can click a device on the floorplan to turn it on or off.
His baby monitor had about 9,000 photos and videos of his son's first three years, but saving them meant clicking each one by hand. He had the AI write a script that downloaded all of them in 45 minutes.
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.
His wife wanted a Skylight wall calendar, the kind that costs about $600. He built his own for $80 on a 32 inch smart TV, with the family calendar, chores, meals, the home cameras, and voice control, and says AI did most of the building.
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.
His young daughter lost the small cap from a water bottle she likes a lot. He asked the AI to design a replacement, printed it in 3D, and says it works perfectly.
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.
A couple keep a shared spreadsheet of shows coming soon, being watched, finished and dropped, plus their thoughts on each one. The AI reads and writes the sheet, adds picks from a list of autumn shows with reasons why they would like them, and will tell them when a show is out.
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.
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.
Home Assistant sends a bin camera image to the Anthropic API, gets JSON for which bins are visible, notifies him which bins to put out or return, and lights a color LED Bindicator; the AI configured the automations via MCP.
Her boiler had stopped heating the water. She sent the AI about 15 pictures step by step, followed its instructions to turn it off, switch a few handles and reset the pressure, and the boiler worked again.
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.
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 new dad, baby born the week before, found his phone was syncing the wrong Family calendar, so the pediatrician appointment did not show on his side. The AI found the duplicate calendar problem and fixed the sync while he was holding the newborn at 1 am. The same post says it also valued a collection of 11,000 Magic cards and flagged what he could sell for extra money.
A father of two walked his house photographing his belongings, including model and serial numbers where he could, and dropped the photos into a folder for the AI. In 20 to 30 minutes it produced a spreadsheet cataloguing the items with descriptions and current replacement values, each with a confidence rating, grouped by room, plus a tab for things needing a second look. He can add photos later and ask for the list to be updated.