His friend keeps his kids cars running and refuses payment, so he found a way to pay him back. He bought a $70 USB adapter that reads car data, and with AI built a server that collects it and lets the AI dig into the readings and suggest what to check. He has tested it on his own 2024 Honda and his friends 2003 GMC truck.
He tried AI on his Mac and asked it to make an agent for his wife’s iMessages. The AI made a watcher under the same the AI instead of a teammate, and when it was denied a trash request it stopped.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
He built a home dashboard with AI that pulls a dozen sources into one wall screen for the whole family. It shows the shared calendar, weather warnings, solar and battery levels, car charge and bin days, and it only brings things up when they matter, like bins out tonight or a frost warning.
His home WiFi kept acting up, so he asked the AI to diagnose it. The AI ran a script that monitored everything for a week and pinned the problem on his Google Nest Wifi, and Reddit posts backed that up.
A homeowner had the AI SSH into his servers and build the long-term data platform his Home Assistant setup lacked: VictoriaMetrics storage with a decade of retention and two Grafana dashboards covering every room's temperature, humidity and computed mould risk plus whole-home solar, battery and per-appliance energy. The agent debugged the pipeline live — querying the databases and APIs, forcing a full restart when a reload silently failed — and a couple of thousand series now flow in, with new devices appearing automatically.
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.
A dog owner shows app screenshots of her AI 'Sir Gilbert' helping manage her bulldog Omar's care: scheduling and planning vet appointments, budgeting during a food-allergy trial, creating a budget for anticipated vet bills, and researching local veterinary dentists suited to a flat-faced breed. She frames it as offloading the scheduling, budgeting and service-finding so she can focus on her dog and baby.
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.
He bought a cheap Bluetooth receipt printer and pointed the AI at it. Now it prints out an email he gets every morning, so he can read it as he starts his day.
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.
He built air quality management for his home studio, all scripted by AI. An AirGradient sensor feeds CO2, temperature and humidity into Home Assistant, which boosts ventilation, kicks on the heat pump, or runs the humidifier when the air drifts from comfortable.
His Pixel 4a sits by his bed all day and Google Assistant used to turn his smart plugs on and off within 5 seconds of a voice command. The AI has replaced it, takes 10 to 20 seconds when it works at all, and usually does nothing.
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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.
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 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.
LLM helped develop in about 10 minutes a tray app that watches for a USB device and switches the TV input via the LG API; he no longer touches the remote.
A dad with no building experience spent a weekend with AI and an $89 circuit board and made his son a talking dinosaur toy. It reads stories, plays the radio, and tells jokes, and it works.
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.
Two e-bikes were stolen after his garage was left open by accident. He set up closing on its own when the door stays open for 15 minutes, and in his own reply on the thread he says he bought a ratgdo control board and the AI wrote and installed the new firmware, so the AI now has full control of the opener and can disable the remotes.
A man with 40 years of circuit and board design asked the AI to design a WiFi fan speed controller around an ESP32 chip, with the circuit, the board files, and the software. The first design took about 15 or 20 minutes. The AI later reviewed his board layout, flagged low voltage traces crossing high voltage ones, then designed its own board with the two areas separated and warnings printed on the board. He bought the parts himself. The boards are on their way and have not been powered up yet.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
He had black mold in his home and no idea what to buy. The AI found a suitable mold spray in a Polish online shop and translated the usage instructions for him.
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.
Vancouver Tesla owner Devin Olsen used AI in his car to order Starbucks while Full Self-Driving drove, confirming the drink and total by voice before the AI placed the order for pickup on arrival. He described it as the first time the car felt like it could run an errand with him.
A case-study carousel describes buyer Advaith Sridhar having an AI agent negotiate a car purchase over email, pitting dealers against each other. It saved $2,102 off sticker — a premium model at a base-car price — with no in-person haggling.
He needed his address history for a co-op application and had struggled to dig out leases from a decade or more back. The AI searched more than 20 years of his Gmail and built a spreadsheet listing his addresses back to 2006, with links to the emails behind each date and a flag on the dates that were only a guess.