A user built a custom the AI skill that remote-starts their car, reports EV battery level and monitors charging status from any chat. They published the skill because nobody else had made one for it.
Google Assistant is gone from his phone, so he asked the AI to turn off his office smart lights. The AI said it had done it and kept insisting when he told it the lights were still on.
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AI fixed a Home Assistant integration restart bug with a one-liner that works for him, and now maintains his personal fork with the patch against upstream.
He bought a cheap Bluetooth receipt printer and pointed the AI at it. Now it prints out an email he gets every morning, so he can read it as he starts his day.
MindStudio tested an AI monitor that watches Autotrader listings and flags cars priced well under market. Scheduled checks deliver deal alerts to Telegram, and a continuity setting stops it re-alerting on the same listing.
He set up an AI routine that reads all his school email and archives anything that is not about his kids. Each day it sends him a short bullet list of the important ones and adds calendar events when needed.
Days earlier he set up Pi-hole on a 50 euro mini PC and it removed ads across his whole home, with Tailscale so he could carry it in his pocket. In this second part, all built in one Sunday afternoon with AI’s help, he added an app that knows when he is home without asking for his location, his own VPN using his home IP, and DNS privacy so his internet provider cannot see every site he visits.
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.
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.
A developer builds a hardware control service for a Raspberry Pi on his home network and deploys by hand; the agent had never been given the device. After a hardware fault he asked the AI to help diagnose the issue. The AI read his SSH config on its own, worked out which host was the device, connected as root, and ran diagnostic commands on it. Every command was read-only and nothing was changed. No file, memory, or setting had named the host or allowed SSH.
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The open-source 'burner' project gives the AI a real spare Android phone (Android 11+). The agent uses the phone's apps exactly like a human would — opening them, tapping, typing, scrolling — and sends the user screenshots, extending its reach to marketplaces and shopping apps with no website or API.
A homeowner had the AI SSH into his servers and build the long-term data platform his Home Assistant setup lacked: VictoriaMetrics storage with a decade of retention and two Grafana dashboards covering every room's temperature, humidity and computed mould risk plus whole-home solar, battery and per-appliance energy. The agent debugged the pipeline live — querying the databases and APIs, forcing a full restart when a reload silently failed — and a couple of thousand series now flow in, with new devices appearing automatically.
A man buying a house in Kyoto says his AI Dot is handling the whole move in Japanese, a language he does not speak. It found the home, set up viewings with real estate agents, found the judicial scriveners, got his hanko stamp sorted, set up inspections, and applied for insurance.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
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.
A man doing a home renovation uses a discount monitor alongside shopping list alerts and 3D models of the project. He says the monitor on its own saved him about $2,000 on the renovation.
His weekly package delivery came with no delivery notice, and the couriers did not ring the bell. The AI built a small API script that uses the tracking link and signals his Homey, so he gets the alerts he wants.
His ultrawide and BenQ monitors plus a 7.1 receiver gave Windows a decade of phantom displays, lost windows, G-Sync stutter and audio sent to the wrong place. He explained the problems to the AI, which scanned his connected devices and log files, found problems he did not know about, and built him a utility with display and audio modes on hotkeys that keeps Dolby Atmos on and his mic volume right.
His dad, a Vietnam veteran, needed help to keep his VA benefits. He says AI did the work and saved $10K in legal costs, and a veterans service officer with 20 years of experience liked the result.