A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
He built a home dashboard with AI that pulls a dozen sources into one wall screen for the whole family. It shows the shared calendar, weather warnings, solar and battery levels, car charge and bin days, and it only brings things up when they matter, like bins out tonight or a frost warning.
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.
The author lost house keys and asked the AI to find locksmiths. One responded with a cal.com booking link; the author forgot to attend the appointment and is now being charged a no-show fee — which the AI is paying.
Home Assistant sends a bin camera image to the Anthropic API, gets JSON for which bins are visible, notifies him which bins to put out or return, and lights a color LED Bindicator; the AI configured the automations via MCP.
His kid's transcript was not going through, so as a last try he asked the AI to make a cleaner version of it. The cleaned version uploaded fine.
He had a PDF of scanned letters from his dad's Navy years, the paper letters long misplaced, and had put the project off for decades. He asked the AI to turn the PDF into an interactive timeline, and after about 10 minutes of prompting it was live online.
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.
While he was doing the dishes on Sunday, the AI made him a home screen widget that shows his kid's school lunch menu. He says he never would have made it himself.
He needed his address history for a co-op application and had struggled to dig out leases from a decade or more back. The AI searched more than 20 years of his Gmail and built a spreadsheet listing his addresses back to 2006, with links to the emails behind each date and a flag on the dates that were only a guess.
His LLM agent reviews his robot vacuum's images and either sends the vacuum out or suggests moving things that would foul it up; works great.
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.