His 2019 LG TV has a great screen, but the official Plex app took about 30 seconds just to show the profile picker, because it is really a web page. There is no public native toolkit for the TV, so he rooted a spare set, read the TVs own software with analysis tools and the AI, and built a native Plex client of his own. On the same TV it shows the profile picker in about 3 seconds.
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.
A parent of three was copying school, cram school and nursery dates from paper prints, LINE and email into Google Calendar by hand, and nearly missed a field trip lunch. He built Hanamaru: the family posts a photo of a print in Slack, the AI pulls out the dates, and it registers them on the right child's calendar, asking in the thread first when it is not sure.
He redid his office after quitting his job and put a spare Roku TV up as a photo frame. The AI built the photo display app in a couple of minutes, so he did not need the $4 a month app from the Roku store.
His parents’ ten blinds ran off one dumb radio remote. With a Flipper Zero he recorded the signals, the AI spec’d an ESP32 board to send them, wrote and flashed the software, and designed a printed case; the blinds now open and close at sunrise and sunset with a small web page for overrides. Later the AI built a phone app so his parents can just ask Siri to open or close them.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
The same man took a photo of a clock this morning and asked the AI to buy replacement batteries. The AI identified the clock from the photo, found its instruction manual, worked out which batteries it takes, and ordered them from Amazon.
Working from a machine an agent had never run well, the AI set up his home server stack over Telegram voice messages: SSH, Docker, Traefik, certificates, split horizon DNS and local models. It also runs his house watching through Frigate and a solar dashboard he can check from his phone.
He runs Home Assistant on an old PC and used AI to make a menu bar app for his Mac. A keyboard shortcut now sets his lights, though he says it may not work as well for homes with lots of different smart devices.
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 man who runs his own services at home sent his AI an article about a PHP security hole. The agent patched the services that had a fix, stopped the ones that did not, set up a watch for new fixes, and updated and restarted nearly everything as fixes landed through the day.
He gave the AI with GPT-6 Astra the measurements of his kids room and what it needed, a divider and a desk for each kid. It built the layout, rendered it in Blender, and made a complete shopping list with the exact furniture models and a ceiling rail for the curtain.
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.
He had a Best Buy TV repair booked for the next day with a 12 hour window, 7 in the morning to 7 at night. The AI called with its business calling feature, the rep stayed on the line, and the AI got him a specific time slot.
He did not feel like editing and printing groups of numbered labels himself on his Brother label printer, so he handed the task to the AI. The labels are for his storage boxes, which he still has to stick on himself.
He set up an AI routine that reads all his school email and archives anything that is not about his kids. Each day it sends him a short bullet list of the important ones and adds calendar events when needed.
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 cookie recipe never came out right, so he gave the job to the AI. The AI adjusted the recipe for higher altitude, changed the prep steps to keep the butter colder longer, and put the fixed recipe into Mealie.
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.
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.
An engineer gave the AI his house drawings, the original solar plans and a Powerwall expansion permit (mostly PDFs plus DXF files) after a contractor was slow to quote, and the bot produced a complete 17-page B-size permit drawing package in under five minutes, including a roof layout and one-line wiring diagrams drawn from scratch. He checked every line himself and planned to submit once a licensed engineer stamped the structural parts.
His old Tuneshine display for album art sat unused because it kept losing its connection and depended on a cloud service. The AI identified the display, ran pin tests, and wrote new firmware, and now a small program on his NAS shows album art or a world clock on it.
He plugged in a soundbar over S/PDIF and got no sound, and searching online did not help. He asked the AI to fix it, and 10 seconds later the problem was diagnosed, the output was enabled and renamed, and it worked.
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.
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.
His dad, a Vietnam veteran, needed help to keep his VA benefits. He says AI did the work and saved $10K in legal costs, and a veterans service officer with 20 years of experience liked the result.
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 took about a week with light steering to convert OpenStreetMap data into his car's map format, a project that would have taken him months to a year, and he now pulls fresh maps that work on the car.
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.
His 15 year old dryer broke on Saturday. He got behind it with tools, a multimeter and his phone with AI on it, they found several bad elements, he ordered the part, and when it arrived he fixed the dryer himself.
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.