A ready made dashboard only shows what the maker thinks matters. His own status monitor, built with AI on a 10.3 inch second screen, shows him when an n8n workflow, a hoster or his lawn mower socket fails, with 53 tests included.
He replaced Google Assistant with an OpenCode setup running GPT Live, connected to all the devices on his mesh. Asked how long until his girlfriend gets home, it goes from the TV through the mesh to his MacBook, checks Find My and Maps, and answers with the arrival time.
The writer is applying for a lead pipe replacement grant. His dot read an email from his builder and told him it did not meet the requirements for the grant he is applying for, flagging the gap before it cost him the application.
From a list of jobs his AI runs day to day: it watches when registration opens for their kids workshops and books a spot automatically when it does. Workshop places go fast, and he treats this as one of the ongoing jobs, not a one off question, that the agent quietly handles for the family.
He needed his address history for a co-op application and had struggled to dig out leases from a decade or more back. The AI searched more than 20 years of his Gmail and built a spreadsheet listing his addresses back to 2006, with links to the emails behind each date and a flag on the dates that were only a guess.
He bought an M5Stack stopwatch for 45 euros and never used it as one. With the AI he turned it into a round Home Assistant info display with 14 modules overnight, in under 25 minutes of typing himself.
He redid his office after quitting his job and put a spare Roku TV up as a photo frame. The AI built the photo display app in a couple of minutes, so he did not need the $4 a month app from the Roku store.
His parents’ ten blinds ran off one dumb radio remote. With a Flipper Zero he recorded the signals, the AI spec’d an ESP32 board to send them, wrote and flashed the software, and designed a printed case; the blinds now open and close at sunrise and sunset with a small web page for overrides. Later the AI built a phone app so his parents can just ask Siri to open or close them.
A hobbyist has the AI or the AI write ForgeCAD code that creates 3D models he prints. A ring to hold the bag in his compost bin went from a multi week project, learning Fusion 360 in spare hours, to a good prototype in 60 minutes, and a cover for his overheating doorbell took a photo of the doorbell, dimensions from the maker’s site and 3 or 4 prints to get right.
Engineer AJ Stuyvenberg let his AI handle his 2026 Hyundai Palisade purchase by email, and it played dealers against each other over several days. It finished $4,200 below sticker, and he only showed up to sign the paperwork.
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.
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.
Wrote a full 3D house planner with AI in a few hours for 10 to 20 euros in credits, and uses it to experiment with furniture, windows, doors and colors.
He built a home dashboard with AI that pulls a dozen sources into one wall screen for the whole family. It shows the shared calendar, weather warnings, solar and battery levels, car charge and bin days, and it only brings things up when they matter, like bins out tonight or a frost warning.
A man asked the AI to sell the junk in his garage. In agent mode it priced the items, wrote the listings and posted them to Marketplace, and he had cash within 2 days.
He set up saved searches on Cars.com, Carvana and CarMax with his makes, models, price, year and features, and favorited cars on each. The AI merged them into one list, checked price guidance, mileage, consumer reports, recalls and reliability, named his ten best and ten worst, and removed the bottom ten from his favorites. They repeated the rounds until the list was tight, then refined by color and features. He test drove two cars from the list. While he was out, the AI checked the stock of two dealerships he drove past, just from him naming the brands nearby, and found one more match. Every morning it reruns the searches, removing cars that sold and adding new ones.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Niraj Rajgor's unused 10th generation Kindle is now a photo frame. Working through AI over Wi-Fi, GPT-6 Astra built tools to run custom software on the Kindle and installed a slideshow app that cycles ten photos, four minutes each, and picks up where it left off after sleep.
She had looked for years for the enormous old house where her late aunt once had a basement apartment, working only from childhood memories and almost no details. The AI found it.