A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
He made a pocket money app for his children. Parents post chores with a payout, the kids get them on their phones, and the quickest to tap accept wins the job. The child adds photo evidence, the parents approve it, and the app totals the week's money on a leaderboard, paid in cash on Friday.
A mother built a morning checklist app with AI over about two weeks, running on a server at home. Her daughter checks it on a tablet each morning, and the usual items open on their own from her timetable, so she is less unsure about what to bring.
He gave an agent his favorite meals, his dietary limits and the food he has on hand. It makes a weekly food plan and a full grocery list, and he tells it over the week which meals he liked.
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.
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.
Kev.odriscoll's the AI read a street-cleaning notice in email and proactively sent a reminder the night before, helping the author avoid a ticket or tow.
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.
Zach SB had the AI phone contractors and follow up by emailing photos for estimates, so the whole quoting round happened without him being present.
Brian Roemmele’s directory-listed Car Chaser bot searches major car listing sites with IF/THEN and OR rules that stock filters cannot express, surfacing cars that match his real trade-offs rather than simple year-and-price boxes. It is an ongoing conditional search, not a one-time query.
Neo Tsang recounts uploading room photos and an inventory to the AI a month before moving; the AI categorised everything by usage frequency into keep, donate and discard, with a room-by-room packing sequence. He also had the AI break down three movers' quotes line by line and picked the middle option at nearly half the most expensive quote (the post closes with a referral code).
A parent of three was copying school, cram school and nursery dates from paper prints, LINE and email into Google Calendar by hand, and nearly missed a field trip lunch. He built Hanamaru: the family posts a photo of a print in Slack, the AI pulls out the dates, and it registers them on the right child's calendar, asking in the thread first when it is not sure.
His cat feeder camera charged $5 a month to store motion clips. He had the AI reverse engineer the feed login so his home server could pull the video, spot the cats, cut clips, save them to R2, and play them in an iOS app, all for $0 a month.
He gave the AI SSH access to his Proxmox homelab and his UniFi router and told it to run a security audit. It found a lot of holes to patch, work that would have meant juggling more than 12 terminals and containers by hand.
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.
A man had a poor quality home plan from the previous owner. For about $1 of his usage quota, the AI converted the drawing into 3D, changed the room he wanted to redo, made a few visual options, built a shopping list from his local store with budgets, and put it all on a local web page. He says the same job done the normal way would take a package of apps, trained people and at least $10,000.
He had a PDF of scanned letters from his dad's Navy years, the paper letters long misplaced, and had put the project off for decades. He asked the AI to turn the PDF into an interactive timeline, and after about 10 minutes of prompting it was live online.
The AI helped flash his router with OpenWrt, including running an exploit itself and instructing the UART steps to load the binary permanently.
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 author lost house keys and asked the AI to find locksmiths. One responded with a cal.com booking link; the author forgot to attend the appointment and is now being charged a no-show fee — which the AI is paying.
His AI Dot, Crysta, just did most of the work renewing his driver's license. He says next year his taxes will be done by AI.
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.