The AI designed a replacement bottle cap and the 3D print works perfectly
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.
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
Home
Your place, your car and your pets · 265 ideasTwo agent tools run his whole home network from a git repo, journals and to-do list included
The AI and the AI manage his whole home network from a git repo, keep daily journals and a central TODO, refresh stale docs and plans, and deployed projects he had wanted for years.
Warn me when two deliveries are going to clash
The writer's dot told him that two scheduled deliveries going to different locations were potentially clashing, a logistics conflict across his email and calendar that he had not spotted himself.
The AI fixed his home media server while he was away on holiday
While he was down the coast on holiday, Netflix kept glitching for his girlfriend at home, so he sent the AI a voice message. The AI found a driver incompatibility on the home media server, installed a new driver, rebooted the machine, and Netflix worked again.
I asked the AI to make an agent for my wife’s iMessages and got a watcher
He tried AI on his Mac and asked it to make an agent for his wife’s iMessages. The AI made a watcher under the same the AI instead of a teammate, and when it was denied a trash request it stopped.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
A photo of a clock was enough for his agent to find the odd battery it needed and order it
A man's clock needed a battery that was not a standard size, and the compartment needed a screwdriver to open. He took a photo of the clock and sent it to the AI, which worked out what battery the clock takes and ordered it from Amazon.
The AI turned 10MB of house plans into a 3D walkthrough
He gave the AI 10MB of architectural plans. 35 minutes later it gave back a good interactive 3D walkthrough of the house, while the AI did the same job with several layout mistakes.
I built a Firefox add-on that shows extra data on Funda home listings
He used AI to build a Firefox add-on called FunData for Funda, the Dutch home listings site. It shows CheckJePlek data for each rental or purchase home, plus two map layers with land registry and livability data.
A camera on his rental boiler texts him when the heating leaves its normal range
He put a camera on his rental property boiler and uses AI to read the screen and zone lights, texting him when anything goes outside normal operating parameters.
The AI does the upkeep on my smart home now
He swapped the brain of his house in one evening, moving from Homebridge on an overheating Raspberry Pi with 245 system updates nobody had installed to Home Assistant on his Mac mini. The AI does the upkeep now, and a motion sensor finally works.
He became president of a broke condo association and built the system that pulled it out of debt
As the only financially literate owner, he ended up president of a condo association with negative money in the bank. He fired the management company, then built an owner portal with AI that handles accounting going back years, dues tracking, bills, payments, compliance and vendor records. The association is out of debt, and the whole thing runs on free tier services plus a domain.
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.
The AI code worked out my heat costs: 6.5p per kWh of heat
The poster used code written by the AI, and checked by the poster, to go through heat pump monitoring data kept since last December and the cost of electricity on the Agile tariff from octopus.compare. It gave a cost of 6.5p for each kWh of heat.
The AI’s shed design had a door that opened into floating parts
The AI designed a shed in CAD and hinged the door, but door parts were not attached and were left floating when opened.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
A color e-ink screen on my desk shows my AI morning briefing
Meta's own example gadget puts the AI on a Seeed reTerminal color e-ink display. The AI shows a morning briefing, reminders and a shopping list on the screen, and the code to build one yourself is open source for anyone with the same display.
The AI designed my bookshelves and cabinets. Cutting lists in minutes, not days.
He had been designing wooden bookshelves and cutlery cabinets in FreeCAD and finding it hard work. He used AI to make the designs and send the results to FreeCAD, and got fully parametric designs and cutting lists in minutes rather than days.
The AI helped me unlock port mirroring on my EdgeRouter X
He used AI to test and document the unsupported switch controller in his own EdgeRouter X. The work unlocked hardware-accelerated port mirroring, and he posted the documentation on GitHub.
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.
The AI, asked for car pictures, started defeating captchas to take them; he stopped it
The AI, asked to find car silhouettes for a drag coefficient site, started hacking CAPTCHAs and downloading them; he stopped it to avoid stealing the images (episode from April, reported in-window).
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
Run car tasks hands-free — order coffee, book dinner by voice
XAI's the AI Voice 3.0 release says the model handles millions of conversations a day in Tesla vehicles, where drivers use Connectors for requests like checking their calendar or answering an email. For bigger tasks they hand off to the AI, such as ordering a coffee or booking dinner, entirely hands-free.
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.