The AI set up his hallway lights and motion routine from a plain description
The AI set up a complex Home Assistant routine with lights and motion sensors from a description, working when he walks past the sensor.
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
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Your place, your car and your pets · 265 ideasMy agent reads the school app and emails us a summary every day
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.
The AI reads my 7 school WhatsApp groups and posts only what is about our daughter
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 AI identified a clock's odd battery from a photo and ordered it
He sent the AI a photo of a clock, it worked out what non-standard battery it took and ordered it from Amazon for him.
The AI wrote the patch for my solar uploads. The fix idea was mine.
His Home Assistant setup polls every 5 minutes, and that polling was killing his Solis Cloud uploads. Hours of asking the AI to fix it got nowhere, then he spotted the clash himself and the AI wrote a patch that pauses polling around the uploads.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
My bot found the broken part in my dryer, ordered it, and talked me through the fix
His dryer broke and he asked the AI for help instead of calling a repair company. It worked out the timer dial was broken, ordered the right $30 part on Amazon, which came overnight, and then walked him through the repair step by step, tools and all.
$200
A man in Kyiv built a tool that only pings him when drone reports come close to home
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.
I built my mechanic friend a car diagnostic app that talks to the AI
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.
The AI turned open map data into his car's format, a months-long job done in a week
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.
A highways engineer built a routing tool that scores roads by five years of crash data
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.
I fixed my 15 year old dryer with AI on my phone
His 15 year old dryer broke on Saturday. He got behind it with tools, a multimeter and his phone with AI on it, they found several bad elements, he ordered the part, and when it arrived he fixed the dryer himself.
The AI built my home remote in half an hour
He had wanted a small Home Assistant remote on an old M5Paper eInk module for 3 years and never built it. The AI did it in half an hour, and the remote now pulls up all his rooms and shows the sensors and buttons he tagged as Remote.
An hour with AI moved his home system onto a private network, documented in git
Spent an hour with AI migrating a Home Assistant setup to Tailscale, updating sensors and Pi-hole, and putting it all in one documented git compose file.
Their freezer died, and photos of the spoiled food became an insurance claim the insurer accepted on the spot
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.
The AI fixed my faulty hardware while I was at dinner
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.
Turn my existing PCs into a subscription-free home camera network
He retired his Nest cameras and had the AI (alongside OpenCode) configure Home Assistant and the camera software on the PCs already in his rooms, Linux and Windows alike, so the household computers now double as his in-house camera system, checkable while traveling - no doorbell-cam subscription.
$10a month
I made music videos from my son's sight word list
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.
Free the AI designed a replacement coat hanger joint he printed in 10 minutes
Free the AI produced an OpenSCAD file he converted to STL and 3D printed a replacement coat hanger joint in 10 minutes, part now in use.
I built a bark logger to prove the neighbor's dog barks for hours
One of several tools he built with AI: a program that listens for the neighbor's dog, detects the barking and logs it to a spreadsheet, so he has a record before he complains.
A local model watches his cameras for open garages, cat sick and thirsty plants
A local LLM in Home Assistant checks camera images for garage door open, cat vomit and plants, notifies him and pauses the cleaning robot schedule, replacing flaky sensors.
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.