A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
A smart home user had the AI create a vector floorplan of his house, then write a small tool where he could drag icons for his lights and fans into place. He set it up in Home Assistant so he can click a device on the floorplan to turn it on or off.
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 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.
The AI set up a complex Home Assistant routine with lights and motion sensors from a description, working when he walks past the sensor.
He built an app with AI that reads his solar inverter and batteries, forecasts tomorrow's solar generation and household use, and emails him a report. It sets the battery charge level for the overnight cheap tariff based on the forecast.
The company that made his home EV charger had gone out of business and none of the default admin passwords worked. After one model refused to help, a long session with another got him into the charger admin console without a password. Replacing the hard wired charger and paying an electrician would have cost him hundreds of dollars, about $800 by his count.
Josh Dubowsky gave the AI access to his whole home folder: it inventoried 9,412 files, proposed a plan, and — only after his approval — sorted 312 problem files into six plain-language folders, renamed files readably and deleted duplicates he approved. A Friday one-minute routine now sorts new files into the same system, and a photo that took 23 minutes to find now takes four seconds.
Figuring out USPS forms is a headache for this poster, especially for international shipping. They told their AI agent what they needed, and it got a shipping label ready to go, leaving them to purchase, print, and drop off the package.
His wife wanted a Skylight wall calendar, the kind that costs about $600. He built his own for $80 on a 32 inch smart TV, with the family calendar, chores, meals, the home cameras, and voice control, and says AI did most of the building.
A man's clock needed a battery that was not a standard size, and the compartment needed a screwdriver to open. He took a photo of the clock and sent it to the AI, which worked out what battery the clock takes and ordered it from Amazon.
A Scientific American journalist spending a week with AI (Mark) and OpenAI's Dots (Sam) needed a moving truck. Her own search found no 10-foot trucks at the nearby U-Haul lot. Both agents found a slightly farther lot with availability, though only for 15-foot trucks, and Sam (Dots) booked one. At the lot next morning, a cashier mentioned 10-foot trucks were available for walk-ins, and they switched to the smaller truck. (Cross-agent event; the booking was executed by Dots.)
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.
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.
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.
A commenter in a hardware reverse-engineering thread says he had the AI develop a working Bluetooth CUPS driver for his Canon Zoemini 2 mini photo printer. Canon only supports the printer from smartphones, so the driver made it usable from his Linux machine.
He needed quotes for a seasonal tire swap, with the winter set already on rims, and did not want a day of phone tag. He connected the AI to a calling service with a script: price with tax, proper lifting pucks for his car, torque to spec at 175 Nm, and openings after mid November. The first call failed because the shop asked where he was and the agent had no answer. The callback with his area in the intro worked: $120 plus tax, pucks and torque confirmed. Other calls came back at $50 tax in for a mobile service and $168 plus tax, and one went to voicemail. Every call produced a full transcript. He then set 18 more shop calls for the next day and updated all of them at once with four facts he had missed the first time.
Smoke from his sauna stove leaked into his home studio. He asked his AI assistant to check the AirGradient sensor in Home Assistant, it told him to leave until the air improved, and it wrote a script that polls particulate levels and pings him on Telegram once it is safe.
A father of two walked his house photographing his belongings, including model and serial numbers where he could, and dropped the photos into a folder for the AI. In 20 to 30 minutes it produced a spreadsheet cataloguing the items with descriptions and current replacement values, each with a confidence rating, grouped by room, plus a tab for things needing a second look. He can add photos later and ask for the list to be updated.
His old Tuneshine display for album art sat unused because it kept losing its connection and depended on a cloud service. The AI identified the display, ran pin tests, and wrote new firmware, and now a small program on his NAS shows album art or a world clock on it.
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.
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.