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Your place, your car and your pets · 265 ideas

I built my mechanic friend a car diagnostic app that talks to the AI

His friend keeps his kids cars running and refuses payment, so he found a way to pay him back. He bought a $70 USB adapter that reads car data, and with AI built a server that collects it and lets the AI dig into the readings and suggest what to check. He has tested it on his own 2024 Honda and his friends 2003 GMC truck.

The AI helped me build a Linux driver for my family film negatives

After his mother died he inherited a box of family film negatives and bought a Plustek 8200i scanner, then found its new chip had no Linux support. The AI helped him capture the Windows driver traffic and build a working SANE driver. Within a few hours he had his first good scan, and days later a near perfect driver with infrared dust removal.

Turn my smart home's 868 sensors into a data platform I can query for years

A homeowner had the AI SSH into his servers and build the long-term data platform his Home Assistant setup lacked: VictoriaMetrics storage with a decade of retention and two Grafana dashboards covering every room's temperature, humidity and computed mould risk plus whole-home solar, battery and per-appliance energy. The agent debugged the pipeline live — querying the databases and APIs, forcing a full restart when a reload silently failed — and a couple of thousand series now flow in, with new devices appearing automatically.

I had the AI turn my ISP box into an access point

He had the AI find a way into his ISP device and change its settings. The AI turned it into a wireless access point with 802.11r, added an access point section to the control panel, and turned off the old ISP's updates and telemetry.

HomePartly worked

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.

Car Chaser: hunt used cars with rules stock filters cannot express

Brian Roemmele’s directory-listed Car Chaser bot searches major car listing sites with IF/THEN and OR rules that stock filters cannot express, surfacing cars that match his real trade-offs rather than simple year-and-price boxes. It is an ongoing conditional search, not a one-time query.

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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.