Home Assistant sends a bin camera image to the Anthropic API, gets JSON for which bins are visible, notifies him which bins to put out or return, and lights a color LED Bindicator; the AI configured the automations via MCP.
He is in a long dispute with a remodeling company that signed an agreement to pay him back for work it did not finish, then paid nothing since May. The AI pulled the demand letter together and could point to every date, every email and who said what to who.
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 had the AI generate a JavaScript app that makes label style images and prints very large letters on A4 paper with a monochrome laser printer. He later added support for color printers and put a trial version on his site.
A smart home user had the AI create a vector floorplan of his house, then write a small tool where he could drag icons for his lights and fans into place. He set it up in Home Assistant so he can click a device on the floorplan to turn it on or off.
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.
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.
A father set the AI up to read 7 school WhatsApp groups twice a day on school days and post only the items about his daughter into a private chat he shares with his wife. It reads PDFs and images too, and caught his name on a volunteer roster he would have missed.
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.
Kilsonmoon sent the AI a photo of a neighborhood water-pipe cleaning notice: The AI identified when his street would be cleaned, added it to his calendar, set a messenger reminder for the day before, and relayed the precautions — close the valve, avoid running the washing machine. It also found the full schedule on the water utility's website and registered ongoing monitoring so future notices trigger automatic alerts.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
His 25 year old Intel Play QX3 microscope had no software that would run on a modern Mac, and he pulled it out for his grandkids. He worked with AI in stages in one morning to build a Mac app for it, and his grandkids were soon watching a seashell through it.
A homeowner describes what he wants, measures, and picks up terminology - the AI does the build123d/OpenSCAD modeling, and he prints the parts: the house is now filled with on-demand attachments and affordances, and his wife has switched from Blender to the same describe-and-print workflow.
He bought an M5Stack stopwatch for 45 euros and never used it as one. With the AI he turned it into a round Home Assistant info display with 14 modules overnight, in under 25 minutes of typing himself.
A father of two walked his house photographing his belongings, including model and serial numbers where he could, and dropped the photos into a folder for the AI. In 20 to 30 minutes it produced a spreadsheet cataloguing the items with descriptions and current replacement values, each with a confidence rating, grouped by room, plus a tab for things needing a second look. He can add photos later and ask for the list to be updated.
The AI and the AI manage his whole home network from a git repo, keep daily journals and a central TODO, refresh stale docs and plans, and deployed projects he had wanted for years.
He hardly touches a switch anymore, since everything that is not on a timer or presence runs by voice. Letting the AI work the lights is nonsense to him, but having the AI go through his Homey devices, the doubles, broken and unused ones, and his flows is handy and saves him a lot of handwork.
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.
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 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.
XAI's the AI Voice 3.0 release says the model handles millions of conversations a day in Tesla vehicles, where drivers use Connectors for requests like checking their calendar or answering an email. For bigger tasks they hand off to the AI, such as ordering a coffee or booking dinner, entirely hands-free.
Spent an hour with AI migrating a Home Assistant setup to Tailscale, updating sensors and Pi-hole, and putting it all in one documented git compose file.
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.
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.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
Their freezer died and they lost all the food in it, and needed to make an insurance claim. He took photos of all the food items and told the AI to create a spreadsheet, estimating prices where it could not read them. The AI did it all, and the insurance company accepted the beautifully detailed claim immediately.
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 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.
The AI created a nightstand clock app for his spare phone from a picture and a quick prompt, and the phone clock is now in daily use on his nightstand.