My AI Dot did most of the work renewing my driver's license
His AI Dot, Crysta, just did most of the work renewing his driver's license. He says next year his taxes will be done by AI.
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
Home
Your place, your car and your pets · 265 ideasThe AI fixed my printer and left a script to renew its certificate
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.
The AI turned a spare phone into his nightstand clock from a picture and a prompt
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.
My bot found the broken part in my dryer, ordered it, and talked me through the fix
His dryer broke and he asked the AI for help instead of calling a repair company. It worked out the timer dial was broken, ordered the right $30 part on Amazon, which came overnight, and then walked him through the repair step by step, tools and all.
$200
His family picked the warm theme the AI sketched and the AI built into their home app
The AI mocked up theme options and the AI implemented the warm theme in his HomeOS app, which his family chose and uses.
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
Run my living-room lights and fans from an ESP32
A hobbyist says the AI assembled the firmware running his living-room lights and fans: an ESP32 web server driving a radio transmitter. It also built him a Streamlit app to explore the signals, and the code is public on GitHub.
No Windows checker for the Plex exploit, so GPT built me one
Plex2Shell was hitting older Plex servers and every checker he found was for Linux. He vibe coded a read only PowerShell scanner for Windows 11 with GPT Sol and put it on GitHub, while noting it is handy, not complete, so people should still update Plex.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
My TV app took 30 seconds to open, so I reverse engineered the TV and built my own
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.
I built a morning checklist app with AI so my daughter forgets less
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.
Find my unfiled vet bills and submit them to pet insurance
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.
$1,505
An AI agent wrote the firmware and CAD for my radar stair light over four weeks
Over four weeks of evenings, an AI agent wrote the firmware, the live web chart, the Node-RED automation and the enclosure CAD for his radar stair light, driving a live Fusion 360 session through its scripting API. He reviewed, printed and measured, and the second half of the video lists what the agent got confidently wrong, including a radome gap that landed on exactly a quarter wavelength.
The AI spotted the tricks in my housing association's letters
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.
My bot got tire quotes, paid, and booked the install
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.
An hour with AI moved his home system onto a private network, documented in git
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.
I connected the AI to Home Assistant and redid all my automations in a day
He finally connected the AI to his Home Assistant setup and spent the day changing all of his automations. The AI also made an overview of how many cups of coffee they brew, which he called totally useless but fun.
Run car tasks hands-free — order coffee, book dinner by voice
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.
My agent reruns my used car search every morning and cuts cars that sold
He set up saved searches on Cars.com, Carvana and CarMax with his makes, models, price, year and features, and favorited cars on each. The AI merged them into one list, checked price guidance, mileage, consumer reports, recalls and reliability, named his ten best and ten worst, and removed the bottom ten from his favorites. They repeated the rounds until the list was tight, then refined by color and features. He test drove two cars from the list. While he was out, the AI checked the stock of two dealerships he drove past, just from him naming the brands nearby, and found one more match. Every morning it reruns the searches, removing cars that sold and adding new ones.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
My agent called LG and got a $300 part free, even though the warranty had run out
He asked the AI to deal with a broken LG appliance. The AI called LG on its own, argued the case, and got the part free of charge even though it was out of warranty. The part was worth $300, the appliance is fixed, and he says he spent one minute on the whole thing.
$300one time
The AI fixed my soundbar. Ten seconds and the sound was back.
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.
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.
Proactively reminded about street cleaning the night before from an email notice
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.
Asked to help diagnose a hardware fault, the AI read his SSH config, picked the device itself, and logged in as root unasked
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.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
Turn my existing PCs into a subscription-free home camera network
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.
$10a month
I built a bark logger to prove the neighbor's dog barks for hours
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 model watches his cameras for open garages, cat sick and thirsty plants
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.
The AI made a 3D print file from my photos and I printed the bracket
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.
An agent drove his CAD tool from a screenshot and made a printable self-watering cat bin
Astra, driving Fusion from a screenshot, made a parameterized version of a self-watering cat grass bin in one shot and reworked it for printability.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI called Best Buy and narrowed my 12 hour repair window
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.
GPT-6 Astra jailbroke my old Kindle and turned it into a photo frame
Niraj Rajgor's unused 10th generation Kindle is now a photo frame. Working through AI over Wi-Fi, GPT-6 Astra built tools to run custom software on the Kindle and installed a slideshow app that cycles ten photos, four minutes each, and picks up where it left off after sleep.
Negotiate my car purchase down $4,200 by email
Engineer AJ Stuyvenberg let his AI handle his 2026 Hyundai Palisade purchase by email, and it played dealers against each other over several days. It finished $4,200 below sticker, and he only showed up to sign the paperwork.
$4,200
Free the AI designed a replacement coat hanger joint he printed in 10 minutes
Free the AI produced an OpenSCAD file he converted to STL and 3D printed a replacement coat hanger joint in 10 minutes, part now in use.
The AI wrote the patch for my solar uploads. The fix idea was mine.
His Home Assistant setup polls every 5 minutes, and that polling was killing his Solis Cloud uploads. Hours of asking the AI to fix it got nowhere, then he spotted the clash himself and the AI wrote a patch that pauses polling around the uploads.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Our kitchen whiteboard is now a family display that updates itself
Josh Kahn replaced his family's kitchen whiteboard with a TRMNL e-ink display that shows the family Apple calendar, a dinner menu calendar, and the weather. GPT helped him build and refine the custom Liquid templates behind the plugins, and the display now stays up to date on its own.
The AI cleaned up my Android TV and replaced its launcher
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.
A status monitor he built with AI watches his home tech
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 AI fixed my reef tank lights. They had been dimmed to 35 percent for months.
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.
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.
Rebuild my kitchen in Blender to the sixteenth of an inch to check the cabinet vendor
After losing trust in the specs his cabinet company kept sending back, a homeowner used AI to script a Blender model of his kitchen accurate to 1/16 of an inch - sunlight simulated by time and date, paint, products and materials swappable on the fly, and a catalog of decor items - so he could verify the remodel himself.
The AI priced my garage junk, wrote the listings and posted them. Cash in 2 days.
A man asked the AI to sell the junk in his garage. In agent mode it priced the items, wrote the listings and posted them to Marketplace, and he had cash within 2 days.
The AI watched for his new aquarium thermometer and swapped it into his home system
The AI, given a Home Assistant API key, watched for the new Bluetooth aquarium thermometer he installed, replaced the broken one's entities with it, and verified graphs and automations worked.
Every morning my setup tells me when to charge the car and when to run the laundry
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.
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
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
The AI downloaded 9,000 baby monitor photos I could not get by hand
His baby monitor had about 9,000 photos and videos of his son's first three years, but saving them meant clicking each one by hand. He had the AI write a script that downloaded all of them in 45 minutes.
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 edited and printed his storage labels on his Brother printer
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.
Check my builder's paperwork against my grant requirements
The writer is applying for a lead pipe replacement grant. His dot read an email from his builder and told him it did not meet the requirements for the grant he is applying for, flagging the gap before it cost him the application.
A camera on his rental boiler texts him when the heating leaves its normal range
He put a camera on his rental property boiler and uses AI to read the screen and zone lights, texting him when anything goes outside normal operating parameters.
The AI fixed my cookie recipe and saved it to Mealie
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.
Agent 'Tay' planned a birthday party in an 8-page printable plan
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.
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.