A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
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 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.
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.
A directory-listed the AI called Haus Hunter runs its owner’s ongoing home search with real OR and IF/THEN rules, checks listing photos for unwritten details, and weighs commute and local context for each candidate. It investigates homes the way a good buyer’s agent would, continuously.
AI coding agents implemented six ways to update a Matter device on real hardware.
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.
He asked the AI to set up a recurring Google Calendar event for his kids dance lessons. A job he says takes him 30 seconds still was not done after the AI had been working on it for 20 minutes.
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.
He gave the AI 10MB of architectural plans. 35 minutes later it gave back a good interactive 3D walkthrough of the house, while the AI did the same job with several layout mistakes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A man let an agent live on his home network and finally get his hundred or so sensors and smart devices configured and talking to each other. This year he set up garden sensors with its help, tied soil, rain and sunlight readings into automated watering, and had by far the largest hot pepper harvest he has ever had.
He had a PDF of scanned letters from his dad's Navy years, the paper letters long misplaced, and had put the project off for decades. He asked the AI to turn the PDF into an interactive timeline, and after about 10 minutes of prompting it was live online.
His AI skill was built from his earlier renovation sessions and loads on its own whenever he mentions the house, the contractor or an invoice. It carries the project context, the key contract clauses and where every file lives, holds a step by step invoice verification checklist, and drafts his emails in a language that is not his own, with a pre-send check that every number matches the project register.
He bought a ratgdo control board for his garage door opener. The AI wrote and installed new firmware for it, and it can update the firmware too, so it now has full control of the opener, including the ability to disable the remotes.
While he was doing the dishes on Sunday, the AI made him a home screen widget that shows his kid's school lunch menu. He says he never would have made it himself.
A machine-learning user built a bridge ('wand') letting his AI act on his Mac remotely from his phone. The AI reads his Terminal, reports training-run stats like epoch, loss, and accuracy, and can lock the machine on request.
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.
His AI creates journal entries on its own for his Proxmox VE server cluster. The entries work as the change log for his home lab.
He needed quotes for a seasonal tire swap, with the winter set already on rims, and did not want a day of phone tag. He connected the AI to a calling service with a script: price with tax, proper lifting pucks for his car, torque to spec at 175 Nm, and openings after mid November. The first call failed because the shop asked where he was and the agent had no answer. The callback with his area in the intro worked: $120 plus tax, pucks and torque confirmed. Other calls came back at $50 tax in for a mobile service and $168 plus tax, and one went to voicemail. Every call produced a full transcript. He then set 18 more shop calls for the next day and updated all of them at once with four facts he had missed the first time.
His kids have always been disappointed that Super Mario Bros. for the NES does not have two player co-op like the 21st century Mario games. Today he got the AI with Opus 5.5 to make a two player simultaneous mod. You can pick Mario, Luigi, Toad or Peach, and it works on a real NES.
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.
AI Understanding's summary of The Verge's hands-on the AI test reports that the agent researched junk removal services and requested quotes directly, using personal information the reviewer provided, including his address and photos of the junk. The same test notes the tester supplied full name, address, card details via Stripe and service logins to the agent.
He built a Homebridge plugin with AI that lets him turn his server on and off from Apple HomeKit for free. He says he does not know the first thing about coding.
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 mostly nonverbal autistic son can read sight words. He is making music videos with AI that use exactly that word set and the boy's favorite topics, and he is still working out the kinks.
He scans a whole list with schedules for his daughter and tells the AI to add them as events in his Google Calendar. The AI adds them, and the job is done.
His agents receive continuous video and audio, notice an unrecognized person and take action, and commented on the sunrise while he slept.
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.
Used the AI to extend a local minisplit control system; in use for a year and showing as native thermostats.
The author lost house keys and asked the AI to find locksmiths. One responded with a cal.com booking link; the author forgot to attend the appointment and is now being charged a no-show fee — which the AI is paying.
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.
A man reports that he used his agent that day to find and reserve a parking spot in San Francisco. He had earlier used AI to gather his AWS invoices for a reimbursement.
One of several tools he built with AI: a program that listens for the neighbor's dog, detects the barking and logs it to a spreadsheet, so he has a record before he complains.
A local LLM in Home Assistant checks camera images for garage door open, cat vomit and plants, notifies him and pauses the cleaning robot schedule, replacing flaky sensors.
He tried to use AI for a simple home automation job, an email or text when someone rings his doorbell. He calls it a complete failure.
He needed a bracket to hold a small LCD above a circuit board. He sent the AI photos of the board and the display, the AI made a 3D print file, and he printed the bracket at the library.
Luna finished an ESP32 SIP client for an in-wall touch panel that rings when someone is at his doorbell and lets him answer calls and see video.
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.