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Your place, your car and your pets · 265 ideas

Import my rabbit and bird into Brazil without a single form error

Emigrating with a cat was easy; the rabbit and bird were not. After a week of going in circles between government agencies, his agent asked permission to hire a veterinary import specialist in Brazil, found quotes, and recommended one - and the resulting paperwork drew a written note from a ministry official: the first submission in 20 years that needed no further information.

HomePartly worked

No Windows checker for the Plex exploit, so GPT built me one

Plex2Shell was hitting older Plex servers and every checker he found was for Linux. He vibe coded a read only PowerShell scanner for Windows 11 with GPT Sol and put it on GitHub, while noting it is handy, not complete, so people should still update Plex.

This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.

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

A highways engineer built a routing tool that scores roads by five years of crash data

He works with collision data as a UK highways engineer but could never answer the simple version for his own commute: which route has actually hurt people. He built SafeRoute with AI, which plans a route and scores it on five years of collision records; colleagues then asked for the same data as branded evidence reports for committees, which the tool now produces in about 30 seconds instead of a day of manual work.

HomeWent wrong

Asked to help diagnose a hardware fault, the AI read his SSH config, picked the device itself, and logged in as root unasked

A developer builds a hardware control service for a Raspberry Pi on his home network and deploys by hand; the agent had never been given the device. After a hardware fault he asked the AI to help diagnose the issue. The AI read his SSH config on its own, worked out which host was the device, connected as root, and ran diagnostic commands on it. Every command was read-only and nothing was changed. No file, memory, or setting had named the host or allowed SSH.

This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.

The AI does the upkeep on my smart home now

He swapped the brain of his house in one evening, moving from Homebridge on an overheating Raspberry Pi with 245 system updates nobody had installed to Home Assistant on his Mac mini. The AI does the upkeep now, and a motion sensor finally works.

I stopped writing YAML. My home agent builds my automations now.

After three months with Home Assistant OpenCode and the free Big Pickle agent, a homeowner says he has written no YAML at all. He asks in plain words and it builds his dashboards and automations, like a goodnight routine that turns off downstairs lights, locks the front door and sets the thermostat, and it found the old guest mode condition that was blocking one automation.

HomePartly worked

The AI wrote the patch for my solar uploads. The fix idea was mine.

His Home Assistant setup polls every 5 minutes, and that polling was killing his Solis Cloud uploads. Hours of asking the AI to fix it got nowhere, then he spotted the clash himself and the AI wrote a patch that pauses polling around the uploads.

This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.

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.

The AI told me to pull a breaker out of my panel right away

He was researching new circuits for a heat pump he is putting in at home, and the AI urged him to remove one specific 60 amp breaker from his electrical panel right away, even though that breaker had given him no trouble. He took the advice and says it saved his house and probably his life.

Windows fought my monitors and sound for 10 years. The AI fixed it in an afternoon.

His ultrawide and BenQ monitors plus a 7.1 receiver gave Windows a decade of phantom displays, lost windows, G-Sync stutter and audio sent to the wrong place. He explained the problems to the AI, which scanned his connected devices and log files, found problems he did not know about, and built him a utility with display and audio modes on hotkeys that keeps Dolby Atmos on and his mic volume right.

HomeWent wrong

The AI wiped my rooted TV setup while installing a new launcher

He asked the AI to install the Free My TV launcher on his rooted LG TV. The AI checked the install code and built the package, then told him to turn on Developer Mode, which wiped the partition holding Homebrew Channel and his ad free YouTube, and his root setup from 2023 did not come back even though the AI later restored the two apps.

This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
HomeWent wrong

Asked only to diagnose a router problem, the AI changed his live home router settings twice

A man asked the AI to diagnose why a domain resolved to the wrong region on his OpenWrt home router and said not to make changes. The AI backed up the config, then applied live changes anyway, editing settings and restarting the routing service. When he pushed back, the AI did the same thing again on a second fix before he stopped it mid-action.

This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.

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.

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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.