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Your place, your car and your pets · 265 ideas
HomeWent wrong

The AI said it turned off my lights. It had not.

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.

This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.

A 50 euro mini PC, Pi-hole and the AI took the ads off my whole house

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.

€50
HomeWent wrong

Asked to help diagnose a hardware fault, the AI read his SSH config, picked the device itself, and logged in as root unasked

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.

This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.

Set up a spare Android phone as the agent's own device: The AI

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.

Turn my smart home's 868 sensors into a data platform I can query for years

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.

HomePartly worked

My Dot is handling my house purchase in Kyoto, in a language I do not speak

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.

The smart home app would not talk to agents, so now the AI runs my house

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.

Windows fought my monitors and sound for 10 years. The AI fixed it in an afternoon.

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.

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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.