Find my unfiled vet bills and submit them to pet insurance
A Reddit user asked the AI to catch up on unfiled vet bills. The AI searched the email backlog, found five bills totalling $1,504.72, and submitted them to the pet insurer.
$1,505
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Your place, your car and your pets · 265 ideasThe AI runs my Home Assistant and writes its automations
After the AI started managing his home systems, he gave it control of Home Assistant too. It proved good at writing automations and doing the setup, and he later moved Home Assistant into a Docker image.
A Lego mailbox flag tells me when the AI finishes a task
He built a Lego mailbox with a small motorised flag. The AI hooks raise the flag when the AI finishes a task or needs him, and lower it when he writes a new prompt or leaves.
It chased my flatmate on email and Instagram until he sent the receipt my oven warranty case needed
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.
The AI spotted the tricks in my housing association's letters
He has had a complaint running with his housing association for months, and the association has missed legal deadlines and blamed other departments. The AI went through their letters and spotted a lot of the irregularities they had partly hidden in legal sounding wording.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI helped me unlock port mirroring on my EdgeRouter X
He used AI to test and document the unsupported switch controller in his own EdgeRouter X. The work unlocked hardware-accelerated port mirroring, and he posted the documentation on GitHub.
AI built his renovation shopping list and found discounts worth about 2,000 dollars
AI built his renovation material list and looked for discounts, saving about 2,000 dollars (watch for fuller sibling telling 50013796, dedupe by case facts at merge).
$2,000
The AI set up his whole 3D printing hobby and runs the printer from plain English
A new 3D printing fan who did not want to learn the software first had the AI help pick a printer it could drive through its API, then build a small home server between the AI and the machine. He can say find me a phone stand: it searches a model library, slices the file, shows time, grams and cost, and prints only after he says yes. It will not start if the loaded filament does not match the slice, and it sends phone alerts with a first layer photo and buttons to resume or cancel. His partner can request prints through a chat page, which he approves. A firmware update broke the camera setup and the AI found and fixed it.
An LLM laid out my furniture in CAD from the boards I had
He gave an LLM the list of boards he had, and it helped lay out the CAD and the cut list for a piece of furniture he wanted, working through OnShape's MCP. He says it got him using hand tools more this week than any week in the last year.
The AI called my kid's school and put the parent teacher conference on my calendar
Comparing the new personal agents, he says the AI called his kid's school and put the parent teacher conference on his calendar. He still rates the AI ahead of the AI Duet for his own use.
Negotiate my car purchase down $4,200 by email
Engineer AJ Stuyvenberg let his AI handle his 2026 Hyundai Palisade purchase by email, and it played dealers against each other over several days. It finished $4,200 below sticker, and he only showed up to sign the paperwork.
$4,200
The AI fixed my printer and left a script to renew its certificate
His HP Color LaserJet Pro M252dw from around 2016 refused to print because its certificate had expired, and searching Google did not help. The AI talked him through the fix, then wrote a script that made a locally signed certificate, uploaded it through the printer's web page, and saved the script in his personal knowledge base, all in about 15 to 20 minutes.
A camera over his bins tells him which ones go out tonight, lit by a coloured LED
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.
My agent hit a human check on Uber and could not finish the ride
Peter Yang used Duet's Uber ride skill and gave it the Palace of Fine Arts as his destination. Uber's browser flow asked for a verify you are human check, Duet could not click through it, and the app gives him no way to see or take over Duet's browser, so the ride was never booked.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
A 25 year old microscope works again after the AI built its app
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.
A physician photographed his whole house into an insurance ready inventory for $6
He is a physician, not a coder. He built a home inventory app where the AI reads each photo and records the item name, brand, model and serial number from labels, then looks up current replacement prices. Photos and receipts back up to the family Google Drive, and the app produces an insurance ready PDF. The whole house cost about $6 in AI charges.
$6one time
The AI helped me set up my router to block ads
He had given up on setting up his router to block ads because the troubleshooting took more effort than he had. Working with AI agent, he got it set up.
Every morning my setup tells me when to charge the car and when to run the laundry
A Danish homeowner linked OpenAI to data from Home Assistant: his car battery, the family calendars and electricity prices. Every morning he gets a small report with advice on when to charge the car and when to wash and dry clothes.
I linked the AI to my smart home hub and talk to my house
A Hubitat owner built a free app that connects his home hub to the AI. He asks the AI if the garage door is closed, tells it to set the house to Night mode, and has it write spoken alert rules, like warning him when a window stays open while the heat is on.
A local model lives in his smart home, answering voice questions about his solar and battery
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.
His discount monitor saved about $2,000 on his renovation project
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.
$2,000one time
The AI now checks Berkeley housing updates against my tracker
He set the AI Tasks up to look up Berkeley housing updates on its own and match what it finds against his own tracker. He called it scary, but useful.
Find and buy the property our emigration required
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 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.
I built a Firefox add-on that shows extra data on Funda home listings
He used AI to build a Firefox add-on called FunData for Funda, the Dutch home listings site. It shows CheckJePlek data for each rental or purchase home, plus two map layers with land registry and livability data.
The AI implemented a pairing protocol in Swift just by talking to his smart plugs
Got the AI to implement TPAP compatibility in Swift purely by interacting with his local plugs and response shapes plus RFC 9383, figuring out it was SPAKE2+ and the password hashing steps.
A landlord's app turns a year of utility bills into the year end overview
For the unit he rents out, he built an app for the utility split. Through the year he feeds it every bill, and at year end one click produces the utility overview he needs for his tenant.
A man in Kyiv built a tool that only pings him when drone reports come close to home
He lives in Kyiv, where Telegram channels post constant updates on incoming drones, sometimes hundreds of messages an hour, too many to read at night. He built a tool with AI that watches those channels and checks every reported location against three circles drawn around his area; when a report lands inside a circle it works out the danger level and sends him a Telegram alert.
The AI named the broken fridge part from my photo. It arrives tomorrow.
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.
Proactively reminded about street cleaning the night before from an email notice
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.
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.