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.
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.
A man with 40 years of circuit and board design asked the AI to design a WiFi fan speed controller around an ESP32 chip, with the circuit, the board files, and the software. The first design took about 15 or 20 minutes. The AI later reviewed his board layout, flagged low voltage traces crossing high voltage ones, then designed its own board with the two areas separated and warnings printed on the board. He bought the parts himself. The boards are on their way and have not been powered up yet.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
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.
TP-Link has no official way for an agent to control its Tapo devices, so he took the app apart, worked out how it talks to the lights, plugs, sensors and cameras on his home network, and built a connector the AI can use. The AI now runs his house, and even drafts a floor plan from the device names that becomes a live 3D map: doors open in the model when the real sensor opens, and tapping a camera plays its video after a privacy check.
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.
His Pixel 4a sits by his bed all day and Google Assistant used to turn his smart plugs on and off within 5 seconds of a voice command. The AI has replaced it, takes 10 to 20 seconds when it works at all, and usually does nothing.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
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.
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.
A Reddit user asked the AI to catch up on unfiled vet bills. The AI searched the email backlog, found five bills totalling $1,504.72, and submitted them to the pet insurer.
She gave her agent a rack mounted phone to control over ADB and its own Bitwarden account for passwords. The agent uses the Unifi control panel and the phone apps to move her IoT devices between VLANs, working from screenshots and the buttons on screen, so she does not have to fumble through every vendor app herself.
Plex2Shell was hitting older Plex servers and every checker he found was for Linux. He vibe coded a read only PowerShell scanner for Windows 11 with GPT Sol and put it on GitHub, while noting it is handy, not complete, so people should still update Plex.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
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 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.
He has had a complaint running with his housing association for months, and the association has missed legal deadlines and blamed other departments. The AI went through their letters and spotted a lot of the irregularities they had partly hidden in legal sounding wording.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
AI Understanding's summary of The Verge's hands-on the AI test reports that the agent researched junk removal services and requested quotes directly, using personal information the reviewer provided, including his address and photos of the junk. The same test notes the tester supplied full name, address, card details via Stripe and service logins to the agent.