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 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.
His local LLM runs permanently as a Home Assistant agent with agentic access to his sensors, answering voice queries about his solar and battery data and creating automations.
He made a pocket money app for his children. Parents post chores with a payout, the kids get them on their phones, and the quickest to tap accept wins the job. The child adds photo evidence, the parents approve it, and the app totals the week's money on a leaderboard, paid in cash on Friday.
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.
A father set the AI up to read 7 school WhatsApp groups twice a day on school days and post only the items about his daughter into a private chat he shares with his wife. It reads PDFs and images too, and caught his name on a volunteer roster he would have missed.
His kids have always been disappointed that Super Mario Bros. for the NES does not have two player co-op like the 21st century Mario games. Today he got the AI with Opus 5.5 to make a two player simultaneous mod. You can pick Mario, Luigi, Toad or Peach, and it works on a real NES.
He retired his Nest cameras and had the AI (alongside OpenCode) configure Home Assistant and the camera software on the PCs already in his rooms, Linux and Windows alike, so the household computers now double as his in-house camera system, checkable while traveling - no doorbell-cam subscription.
The family's move required buying a property abroad: a buying engine found the place, and an agent then saw the purchase through to completion, handing the owner a step-by-step list of the only parts a human could do - mostly moving the money across the Atlantic.
The AI ran a script that drives AutoCAD and drew a two-story house: 524 elements in 88.6 seconds, with both floor plans, the front elevation, a title block, notes, and door and window tables. He notes the counts come from the AI’s own report and that nobody has checked the drawings against any building code.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
His home network had eight VLANs and no firewall rules between them, scoring 70 out of 100 on an audit with segmentation at 0 of 25. The AI, working through a UniFi MCP server, designed a default deny zone setup, previewed each rule, and wrote it only after he confirmed. Three audit runs took the score to 93, though one change briefly broke DNS on a live VLAN before it was rolled back.
The AI diagnosed the user's failing waterfall pump, selected an efficient replacement, designed a 3D-printable adapter for it, and separately saved $1,100 a year moving car insurance from AAA to Progressive.
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.
He runs the AI on his PC with ha-mcp on the same machine, so the AI can reach into Home Assistant and make the changes he asks for. He keeps it on his own PC only, and says a new dashboard is done as soon as he describes it.
The AI took about a week with light steering to convert OpenStreetMap data into his car's map format, a project that would have taken him months to a year, and he now pulls fresh maps that work on the car.
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 put a camera on his rental property boiler and uses AI to read the screen and zone lights, texting him when anything goes outside normal operating parameters.