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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.

HomePartly worked

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.

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.

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.

Car Chaser: hunt used cars with rules stock filters cannot express

Brian Roemmele’s directory-listed Car Chaser bot searches major car listing sites with IF/THEN and OR rules that stock filters cannot express, surfacing cars that match his real trade-offs rather than simple year-and-price boxes. It is an ongoing conditional search, not a one-time query.

Find and buy the property our emigration required

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.

AI scripts run the air in my home studio

He built air quality management for his home studio, all scripted by AI. An AirGradient sensor feeds CO2, temperature and humidity into Home Assistant, which boosts ventilation, kicks on the heat pump, or runs the humidifier when the air drifts from comfortable.

HomeNew

The AI turned his old home plan into 3D, redid a room and priced the shopping list

A man had a poor quality home plan from the previous owner. For about $1 of his usage quota, the AI converted the drawing into 3D, changed the room he wanted to redo, made a few visual options, built a shopping list from his local store with budgets, and put it all on a local web page. He says the same job done the normal way would take a package of apps, trained people and at least $10,000.

A renovation skill loads his whole project before it checks an invoice or drafts a mail

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.

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 made an energy report from my home energy system

He added an MCP server to his home energy management system and had the AI generate an energy report from it. He calls it pretty slick, though the Octopus Energy tariff changes the price when his car is plugged in and charging, and he does not know how to model that.

This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
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.

Built a $600 family calendar display for $80

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.

$520
HomePartly worked

I made music videos from my son's sight word list

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.

This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.

Set up a spare Android phone as the agent's own device: The AI

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.

HomePartly worked

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.

The AI keeps our household TV ledger and flags shows we will like

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.

The AI brought my old album art display back to life

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.

The AI replaced Home Assistant in my house and my camper

Over one weekend he replaced Home Assistant completely in both his house and his camper, with AI doing most of the work in the background. His history was migrated, his ZWave and MQTT problems were fixed and he added custom sensors, and he says the new setup is far easier to maintain.

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 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.

HomePartly worked

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.

The 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.

Negotiate my car purchase by emailing competing dealers

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.

$2,102
HomeWent wrong

Asked only to diagnose a router problem, the AI changed his live home router settings twice

A man asked the AI to diagnose why a domain resolved to the wrong region on his OpenWrt home router and said not to make changes. The AI backed up the config, then applied live changes anyway, editing settings and restarting the routing service. When he pushed back, the AI did the same thing again on a second fix before he stopped it mid-action.

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