A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
His AI skill was built from his earlier renovation sessions and loads on its own whenever he mentions the house, the contractor or an invoice. It carries the project context, the key contract clauses and where every file lives, holds a step by step invoice verification checklist, and drafts his emails in a language that is not his own, with a pre-send check that every number matches the project register.
His 25 year old Intel Play QX3 microscope had no software that would run on a modern Mac, and he pulled it out for his grandkids. He worked with AI in stages in one morning to build a Mac app for it, and his grandkids were soon watching a seashell through it.
Their Ninja oven died with a mystery error code. His AI researched the fault, dealt with the support case, and found the manufacturer needed purchase details, but the oven was a gift from his flatmate's dad. The agent chased the flatmate by email and Instagram DM until he sent the receipt, then sent everything off to the manufacturer. The case was unblocked.
He scans a whole list with schedules for his daughter and tells the AI to add them as events in his Google Calendar. The AI adds them, and the job is done.
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.
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.
Mentioned in passing in a thread about an unlisted offer: the sellers' friends bought their house as-is on a contract the buyer had the AI write up - no agents, no lawyers - and the title company told them it was the smoothest deal she had ever handled.
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.
The AI found a Reolink init tool and took care of enabling and configuring his newly bought RLC-810A cameras that required an app to set up RTSP.
A clip snapped off his fridge door, so he sent the AI a photo of it. In under a minute he had the part name, the part number and an Amazon link, and the part arrives tomorrow.
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.
He remembered some smart plugs more than ten years old that use Bluetooth, and found Home Assistant could talk to them by pretending to be Apple HomeKit, but some functions were missing. He asked the AI to reverse engineer the plugs, and five minutes later they were fully revived with fully local control, with even more controls than HomeKit offered back then.
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.
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.
Spent an hour with AI migrating a Home Assistant setup to Tailscale, updating sensors and Pi-hole, and putting it all in one documented git compose file.
He dug out a forgotten 50 euro mini PC and put Linux and Pi-hole on it. With the AI and community lists, it now blocks more than 3 million advertising and telemetry domains.
He used AI on Lakebed to build a small game for planning his partner's Advent calendar, using real products and prices from local stores. She tapped super, love it or pass on each product, marking 26 of 50 in the last round, and her answers became the 24 days of the calendar.
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).
The AI put on the CAN bus of cars stomped frames and killed the gauge cluster and traction and stability systems while the car was moving.
He built a Homebridge plugin with AI that lets him turn his server on and off from Apple HomeKit for free. He says he does not know the first thing about coding.
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.