The AI built a simple phone dialer for my dad, who has Alzheimer's
No app fit what his father needed, so the AI wrote a bare bones dialer in about an hour. It only shows accept and reject buttons, and he says it is perfect.
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Your place, your car and your pets · 265 ideasSchedule my internet installation — stuck at a human check, I finished it myself
The Verge's reviewer had a Dot schedule a new internet provider installation; it navigated most of the signup and even found a $100 promotional discount buried in deleted email. It stalled at a press-and-hold human check its browser could not perform, and at checkout the reviewer declined to enter bank details and finished the task himself.
$100at stake
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
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.
Watch Autotrader and alert me to mispriced supercars
MindStudio tested an AI monitor that watches Autotrader listings and flags cars priced well under market. Scheduled checks deliver deal alerts to Telegram, and a continuity setting stops it re-alerting on the same listing.
My agent moves my smart home devices between networks so I do not have to open every app
She gave her agent a rack mounted phone to control over ADB and its own Bitwarden account for passwords. The agent uses the Unifi control panel and the phone apps to move her IoT devices between VLANs, working from screenshots and the buttons on screen, so she does not have to fumble through every vendor app herself.
Built a $600 family calendar display for $80
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.
$520
The AI’s shed design had a door that opened into floating parts
The AI designed a shed in CAD and hinged the door, but door parts were not attached and were left floating when opened.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
My agent found the fault on my combine that a paid mechanic missed
A farmer's John Deere combine had an electronics fault for days and a paid Deere mechanic could not find it. Working with AI, he built a test suite that read the machine's CanBUS messages and the traces from his oscilloscope, and compared both against a second working combine. They found two faulty controllers and the machine runs again.
Organize my entire computer, but touch nothing without my yes
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.
We built a local family assistant that runs our calendar and reminders
His family of three uses a local assistant called Sadie, built on a home server so their calendar, photos and messages stay off cloud services. Sadie runs their shared calendar, sends location based reminders, answers texts and emails, searches family photos, and sorts household mail, flagging bills and school deadlines.
Identify my discontinued drill battery from a photo and find one on eBay
From a photo, the AI identified the user's discontinued drill battery and found an aftermarket replacement on eBay.
My agent reruns my used car search every morning and cuts cars that sold
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.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
After hours of trying, the AI wrote the phone app I needed
He spent hours trying to set up a phone for a man with Alzheimer's and could not get it right. Then the AI wrote the app he needed.
He debloated his TV and replaced its assistant with AI
He debloated his Android TV and replaced Google Assistant with AI.
The AI helped me build a Linux driver for my family film negatives
After his mother died he inherited a box of family film negatives and bought a Plustek 8200i scanner, then found its new chip had no Linux support. The AI helped him capture the Windows driver traffic and build a working SANE driver. Within a few hours he had his first good scan, and days later a near perfect driver with infrared dust removal.
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
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.
The AI built the Home Hub app his household now runs on
He built a household app with AI that holds the family calendar, shopping list, chore rotas, house documents, and push notifications. The family uses it daily, an update in the thread says it survived a move to a new host with its 147 releases intact, and he calls it probably the best thing he has made with AI.
It watches for kids workshop registration to open and books a spot on its own
From a list of jobs his AI runs day to day: it watches when registration opens for their kids workshops and books a spot automatically when it does. Workshop places go fast, and he treats this as one of the ongoing jobs, not a one off question, that the agent quietly handles for the family.
The AI built a wind watcher that shuts off my 10 foot Halloween figure
He added a 10 foot Oogie Boogie figure next to Jack and worried strong winds would damage it. He had the AI build a script that watches wind speeds at the airport and turns off the WiFi switch running the fan when the wind passes a set limit.
The AI got him back into his own EV charger and saved about $800
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.
$800
A local model trio is opening up his house's proprietary devices, layer by layer
A local Qwen under Strata and the AI helped reverse engineer proprietary devices around his house and write compatibility layers and binary hacks.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
An hour with AI moved his home system onto a private network, documented in git
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.
Run an 8-bot crew to haggle my car purchase down $4,200
A buyer ran an eight-bot the AI crew for his car purchase: over nine days a SCOUT bot watched 1,412 listings, a VALUER bot built a price curve, and a HAGGLE bot sent 11 messages to the dealer. The dealer came down $4,200.
$4,200one time
I used AI to build a piano game for my nephew. He loved it.
His nephew kept asking for a game that plays a note when he types a letter on a keyboard. He used AI to build it and put it online, and his nephew loved it.
The AI keeps our household TV ledger and flags shows we will like
A couple keep a shared spreadsheet of shows coming soon, being watched, finished and dropped, plus their thoughts on each one. The AI reads and writes the sheet, adds picks from a list of autumn shows with reasons why they would like them, and will tell them when a show is out.
An agent drove his CAD tool from a screenshot and made a printable self-watering cat bin
Astra, driving Fusion from a screenshot, made a parameterized version of a self-watering cat grass bin in one shot and reworked it for printability.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
I connected the AI to Home Assistant and redid all my automations in a day
He finally connected the AI to his Home Assistant setup and spent the day changing all of his automations. The AI also made an overview of how many cups of coffee they brew, which he called totally useless but fun.
The AI revived my decade old smart plugs in five minutes
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.
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.
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.