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
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Your place, your car and your pets · 265 ideasSchool prints go in Slack. Our family calendar fills itself.
A parent of three was copying school, cram school and nursery dates from paper prints, LINE and email into Google Calendar by hand, and nearly missed a field trip lunch. He built Hanamaru: the family posts a photo of a print in Slack, the AI pulls out the dates, and it registers them on the right child's calendar, asking in the thread first when it is not sure.
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.
He rebuilt his parents’ blind controls so the house opens and closes itself with the sun
His parents’ ten blinds ran off one dumb radio remote. With a Flipper Zero he recorded the signals, the AI spec’d an ESP32 board to send them, wrote and flashed the software, and designed a printed case; the blinds now open and close at sunrise and sunset with a small web page for overrides. Later the AI built a phone app so his parents can just ask Siri to open or close them.
The AI flashed his router with open firmware, running the exploit itself
The AI helped flash his router with OpenWrt, including running an exploit itself and instructing the UART steps to load the binary permanently.
Diagnose my waterfall pump, design a 3D-printable adapter, and cut my car insurance
The AI diagnosed the user's failing waterfall pump, selected an efficient replacement, designed a 3D-printable adapter for it, and separately saved $1,100 a year moving car insurance from AAA to Progressive.
$1,100a year
The AI talked me through fixing my boiler. It works now.
Her boiler had stopped heating the water. She sent the AI about 15 pictures step by step, followed its instructions to turn it off, switch a few handles and reset the pressure, and the boiler worked again.
Find a U-Haul lot that actually has a truck for my move
A Scientific American journalist spending a week with AI (Mark) and OpenAI's Dots (Sam) needed a moving truck. Her own search found no 10-foot trucks at the nearby U-Haul lot. Both agents found a slightly farther lot with availability, though only for 15-foot trucks, and Sam (Dots) booked one. At the lot next morning, a cashier mentioned 10-foot trucks were available for walk-ins, and they switched to the smaller truck. (Cross-agent event; the booking was executed by Dots.)
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Run my buddy’s sprinklers off the weather and cut his water bill
A user set an AI running his friend’s sprinkler system based on weather patterns, and reported big savings on the water bill. The system waters when the forecast says it matters, not on a dumb timer.
After hours of trying, the AI wrote the phone app I needed
He spent hours trying to set up a phone for a man with Alzheimer's and could not get it right. Then the AI wrote the app he needed.
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.