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.
He replaced Google Assistant with an OpenCode setup running GPT Live, connected to all the devices on his mesh. Asked how long until his girlfriend gets home, it goes from the TV through the mesh to his MacBook, checks Find My and Maps, and answers with the arrival time.
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.
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 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.
He bought an M5Stack stopwatch for 45 euros and never used it as one. With the AI he turned it into a round Home Assistant info display with 14 modules overnight, in under 25 minutes of typing himself.
He redid his office after quitting his job and put a spare Roku TV up as a photo frame. The AI built the photo display app in a couple of minutes, so he did not need the $4 a month app from the Roku store.
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.