A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
A user built a custom the AI skill that remote-starts their car, reports EV battery level and monitors charging status from any chat. They published the skill because nobody else had made one for it.
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.
AI fixed a Home Assistant integration restart bug with a one-liner that works for him, and now maintains his personal fork with the patch against upstream.
He bought a cheap Bluetooth receipt printer and pointed the AI at it. Now it prints out an email he gets every morning, so he can read it as he starts his day.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A mother built a morning checklist app with AI over about two weeks, running on a server at home. Her daughter checks it on a tablet each morning, and the usual items open on their own from her timetable, so she is less unsure about what to bring.
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.
He sent the AI a photo of a clock, it worked out what non-standard battery it took and ordered it from Amazon for him.
The open-source 'burner' project gives the AI a real spare Android phone (Android 11+). The agent uses the phone's apps exactly like a human would — opening them, tapping, typing, scrolling — and sends the user screenshots, extending its reach to marketplaces and shopping apps with no website or API.
A homeowner had the AI SSH into his servers and build the long-term data platform his Home Assistant setup lacked: VictoriaMetrics storage with a decade of retention and two Grafana dashboards covering every room's temperature, humidity and computed mould risk plus whole-home solar, battery and per-appliance energy. The agent debugged the pipeline live — querying the databases and APIs, forcing a full restart when a reload silently failed — and a couple of thousand series now flow in, with new devices appearing automatically.
He told the AI to scan his home network for his Samsung Frame TV and replace the picture in its art mode. The AI found the TV and swapped the picture.
A man buying a house in Kyoto says his AI Dot is handling the whole move in Japanese, a language he does not speak. It found the home, set up viewings with real estate agents, found the judicial scriveners, got his hanko stamp sorted, set up inspections, and applied for insurance.
TP-Link has no official way for an agent to control its Tapo devices, so he took the app apart, worked out how it talks to the lights, plugs, sensors and cameras on his home network, and built a connector the AI can use. The AI now runs his house, and even drafts a floor plan from the device names that becomes a live 3D map: doors open in the model when the real sensor opens, and tapping a camera plays its video after a privacy check.
A man doing a home renovation uses a discount monitor alongside shopping list alerts and 3D models of the project. He says the monitor on its own saved him about $2,000 on the renovation.
His weekly package delivery came with no delivery notice, and the couriers did not ring the bell. The AI built a small API script that uses the tracking link and signals his Homey, so he gets the alerts he wants.
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.
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.
In the evening he screenshots the kids' activity times from the WhatsApp groups he is in. The AI puts them on the family calendar for him.
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.
He set the AI Tasks up to look up Berkeley housing updates on its own and match what it finds against his own tracker. He called it scary, but useful.
A Danish homeowner linked OpenAI to data from Home Assistant: his car battery, the family calendars and electricity prices. Every morning he gets a small report with advice on when to charge the car and when to wash and dry clothes.
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 connected the AI to his Android TV with adb and took off all the stuff that came preinstalled on it. He says the TV is now left exactly how he wants it.
Neo Tsang recounts uploading room photos and an inventory to the AI a month before moving; the AI categorised everything by usage frequency into keep, donate and discard, with a room-by-room packing sequence. He also had the AI break down three movers' quotes line by line and picked the middle option at nearly half the most expensive quote (the post closes with a referral code).
In the same week as his treadmill buy, a SpaceX launch engineer says his AI got several quotes for new car tires, paid for them, and scheduled the install. No prices or shop names were shown.
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 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.
A rural homeowner had the AI mine months of his circuit-level power-monitor readings against his bills and assemble a packet documenting brownouts down to 95V, then help fill out the Board of Public Utilities complaint - JCP&L called back within two days.
From a list of jobs his AI runs day to day: it watches when registration opens for their kids workshops and books a spot automatically when it does. Workshop places go fast, and he treats this as one of the ongoing jobs, not a one off question, that the agent quietly handles for the family.
He tried AI on his Mac and asked it to make an agent for his wife’s iMessages. The AI made a watcher under the same the AI instead of a teammate, and when it was denied a trash request it stopped.
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.
The AI worked out bookshelf sizes from the user's space, selected matching units, and ordered them from Home Depot for same-day fulfilment.
The AI helped flash his router with OpenWrt, including running an exploit itself and instructing the UART steps to load the binary permanently.
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.
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.
Mentioned in passing in a thread about an unlisted offer: the sellers' friends bought their house as-is on a contract the buyer had the AI write up - no agents, no lawyers - and the title company told them it was the smoothest deal she had ever handled.
A man's clock needed a battery that was not a standard size, and the compartment needed a screwdriver to open. He took a photo of the clock and sent it to the AI, which worked out what battery the clock takes and ordered it from Amazon.
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 young daughter lost the small cap from a water bottle she likes a lot. He asked the AI to design a replacement, printed it in 3D, and says it works perfectly.
He used AI to fight a parking ticket his 82 year old dad had been given. The $120 ticket went away.
Got the AI to implement TPAP compatibility in Swift purely by interacting with his local plugs and response shapes plus RFC 9383, figuring out it was SPAKE2+ and the password hashing steps.
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.
He asked the AI to install the Free My TV launcher on his rooted LG TV. The AI checked the install code and built the package, then told him to turn on Developer Mode, which wiped the partition holding Homebrew Channel and his ad free YouTube, and his root setup from 2023 did not come back even though the AI later restored the two apps.
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.
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.
Zach SB had the AI phone contractors and follow up by emailing photos for estimates, so the whole quoting round happened without him being present.
His corals died but the tank lights still ran a coral schedule. The AI drove a Raspberry Pi over Bluetooth, changed the light and pump schedules, and found the lights had been dimmed to about 35 percent and their clock was 6 and a half hours late, then fixed the time.
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.