He remembered some smart plugs more than ten years old that use Bluetooth, and found Home Assistant could talk to them by pretending to be Apple HomeKit, but some functions were missing. He asked the AI to reverse engineer the plugs, and five minutes later they were fully revived with fully local control, with even more controls than HomeKit offered back then.
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.
A father set the AI up to read 7 school WhatsApp groups twice a day on school days and post only the items about his daughter into a private chat he shares with his wife. It reads PDFs and images too, and caught his name on a volunteer roster he would have missed.
His kids have always been disappointed that Super Mario Bros. for the NES does not have two player co-op like the 21st century Mario games. Today he got the AI with Opus 5.5 to make a two player simultaneous mod. You can pick Mario, Luigi, Toad or Peach, and it works on a real NES.
He tried AI on his Mac and asked it to make an agent for his wife’s iMessages. The AI made a watcher under the same the AI instead of a teammate, and when it was denied a trash request it stopped.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
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.
He runs the AI on his PC with ha-mcp on the same machine, so the AI can reach into Home Assistant and make the changes he asks for. He keeps it on his own PC only, and says a new dashboard is done as soon as he describes it.
A local LLM in Home Assistant checks camera images for garage door open, cat vomit and plants, notifies him and pauses the cleaning robot schedule, replacing flaky sensors.
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.