An AI agent renewed my car registration for me
He is beta testing an AI agent, and it renewed his car registration for him. He says how much time it saved is debatable, but the renewal got done.
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
He is beta testing an AI agent, and it renewed his car registration for him. He says how much time it saved is debatable, but the renewal got done.
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.
The self-scan ran 2026-09-23 and confirmed capabilities present on the device that Meta's public documentation doesn't mention.
He had wanted a small Home Assistant remote on an old M5Paper eInk module for 3 years and never built it. The AI did it in half an hour, and the remote now pulls up all his rooms and shows the sensors and buttons he tagged as Remote.
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.
Josh Dubowsky gave the AI access to his whole home folder: it inventoried 9,412 files, proposed a plan, and — only after his approval — sorted 312 problem files into six plain-language folders, renamed files readably and deleted duplicates he approved. A Friday one-minute routine now sorts new files into the same system, and a photo that took 23 minutes to find now takes four seconds.
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.
He gave an agent his favorite meals, his dietary limits and the food he has on hand. It makes a weekly food plan and a full grocery list, and he tells it over the week which meals he liked.
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.
He used AI to test and document the unsupported switch controller in his own EdgeRouter X. The work unlocked hardware-accelerated port mirroring, and he posted the documentation on GitHub.
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.