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Your place, your car and your pets · 265 ideas

My agent found the fault on my combine that a paid mechanic missed

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.

The AI set up his whole 3D printing hobby and runs the printer from plain English

A new 3D printing fan who did not want to learn the software first had the AI help pick a printer it could drive through its API, then build a small home server between the AI and the machine. He can say find me a phone stand: it searches a model library, slices the file, shows time, grams and cost, and prints only after he says yes. It will not start if the loaded filament does not match the slice, and it sends phone alerts with a first layer photo and buttons to resume or cancel. His partner can request prints through a chat page, which he approves. A firmware update broke the camera setup and the AI found and fixed it.

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

Schedule my internet installation — stuck at a human check, I finished it myself

The Verge's reviewer had a Dot schedule a new internet provider installation; it navigated most of the signup and even found a $100 promotional discount buried in deleted email. It stalled at a press-and-hold human check its browser could not perform, and at checkout the reviewer declined to enter bank details and finished the task himself.

$100at stake
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HomeWent wrong

The AI said it turned off my lights. It had not.

Google Assistant is gone from his phone, so he asked the AI to turn off his office smart lights. The AI said it had done it and kept insisting when he told it the lights were still on.

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

Manage my bulldog's vet care — appointments, budgets and research

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.

The AI built a game to plan my partner's Advent calendar

He used AI on Lakebed to build a small game for planning his partner's Advent calendar, using real products and prices from local stores. She tapped super, love it or pass on each product, marking 26 of 50 in the last round, and her answers became the 24 days of the calendar.

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

The AI drew a whole two-story house in AutoCAD in 88.6 seconds

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.

My agent got my USPS shipping label ready to go

Figuring out USPS forms is a headache for this poster, especially for international shipping. They told their AI agent what they needed, and it got a shipping label ready to go, leaving them to purchase, print, and drop off the package.

The AI revived my decade old smart plugs in five minutes

He remembered some smart plugs more than ten years old that use Bluetooth, and found Home Assistant could talk to them by pretending to be Apple HomeKit, but some functions were missing. He asked the AI to reverse engineer the plugs, and five minutes later they were fully revived with fully local control, with even more controls than HomeKit offered back then.

The AI got him back into his own EV charger and saved about $800

The company that made his home EV charger had gone out of business and none of the default admin passwords worked. After one model refused to help, a long session with another got him into the charger admin console without a password. Replacing the hard wired charger and paying an electrician would have cost him hundreds of dollars, about $800 by his count.

$800
HomeWent wrong

Asked the AI to enable the business phone-calling feature; it admitted it can't

The author's the AI screenshot shows the agent admitting 'there's no switch on my end — I can't enable it myself' and offering that it drafted an unsent request: 'wants the business phone-calling feature enabled on their account so the AI can call US companies on their behalf.'

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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.

He photographed his whole house and the AI built his fire insurance list

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 writes the code for parts he 3D prints, a compost bin ring in 60 minutes

A hobbyist has the AI or the AI write ForgeCAD code that creates 3D models he prints. A ring to hold the bag in his compost bin went from a multi week project, learning Fusion 360 in spare hours, to a good prototype in 60 minutes, and a cover for his overheating doorbell took a photo of the doorbell, dimensions from the maker’s site and 3 or 4 prints to get right.

Make my Canon photo printer work with Linux

A commenter in a hardware reverse-engineering thread says he had the AI develop a working Bluetooth CUPS driver for his Canon Zoemini 2 mini photo printer. Canon only supports the printer from smartphones, so the driver made it usable from his Linux machine.

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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.