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.
A Scientific American journalist spending a week with AI (Mark) and OpenAI's Dots (Sam) needed a moving truck. Her own search found no 10-foot trucks at the nearby U-Haul lot. Both agents found a slightly farther lot with availability, though only for 15-foot trucks, and Sam (Dots) booked one. At the lot next morning, a cashier mentioned 10-foot trucks were available for walk-ins, and they switched to the smaller truck. (Cross-agent event; the booking was executed by Dots.)
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.
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.
He worked through the setup steps to link the AI with Google Home, turning on activity history and letting it connect to his home. After that, he could ask the AI to turn on his lights and it worked.
Her AI Tay produced an 8-page printable birthday party plan ('Shine Like a Star') with a $700 budget breakdown; she approved it and Tay set three calendar reminders.
The AI in the car, with Gmail and Home Assistant connectors, calculated car charging from home power metrics and calendar, and operated the garage door, lights and air conditioners from the car.
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.
As the only financially literate owner, he ended up president of a condo association with negative money in the bank. He fired the management company, then built an owner portal with AI that handles accounting going back years, dues tracking, bills, payments, compliance and vendor records. The association is out of debt, and the whole thing runs on free tier services plus a domain.
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 completed and submitted the PRESTO service-guarantee form for a disrupted GO Train trip, the transit agency's compensation route most riders never bother with.
He gave the AI his TV model number. It found the TV on his wifi, removed 25 Xiaomi packages and wrote a new launcher, so the TV now looks like an Apple TV.
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.
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.
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.
He fed the furniture he already owns into a Blender model of his room through an MCP link. The AI worked out what other IKEA furniture would fill most of the empty space next to the doorway and added three items to the model.
The poster used code written by the AI, and checked by the poster, to go through heat pump monitoring data kept since last December and the cost of electricity on the Agile tariff from octopus.compare. It gave a cost of 6.5p for each kWh of heat.
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.
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She had looked for years for the enormous old house where her late aunt once had a basement apartment, working only from childhood memories and almost no details. The AI found it.
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.
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 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.
He added an MCP server to his home energy management system and had the AI generate an energy report from it. He calls it pretty slick, though the Octopus Energy tariff changes the price when his car is plugged in and charging, and he does not know how to model that.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
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.
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.