Real AI agent use cases, with sources and setup prompts
Gadgets and apps people brought back to life with AI agents after the maker dropped support, each linked to the original post. 14 matching use cases below, each with a public source.
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A $400 robot vacuum sat in a cupboard for 2 years after the maker's cloud shut down. He used Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code to reverse-engineer how it talked to the servers, built a local server to control it, and scheduled weekday cleans at 40% suction.
Claude helped him clean old software off his Mac, including apps not built for Apple Silicon. Canon never released an Apple Silicon version of his scanner app, so Codex one-shotted a replacement with a better UI.
With no earphones or phone mount on his two-wheeler, a builder used Claude Code to reverse-engineer a cheap boAt smartwatch's Bluetooth protocol so Google Maps turns arrive on his wrist as dots and dashes.
A retro fan plugged a Raspberry Pi into an old TV and pointed Claude at it. It now runs his own cable network with internet streaming, live weather and movies from his NAS, plus a phone remote he built.
A reversing setup where Sonnet 5.5 maps the binary, Opus 5.5 rebuilds the hard logic and Fable 5.1 only steps in to stress-test a theory that already passed its tests.
A GNOME developer wanted to scan his late mother's film negatives on a Plustek scanner that Linux no longer supported. He had Claude Code set up a Windows virtual machine with the scanner passed through, capture the USB traffic of the vendor driver, and compare it with Linux until scans worked. He then had Claude turn the scripts into a reusable hardware reverse-engineering harness.
Niraj Rajgor used Codex and T3 Code on his Mac to have an agent connect to his Kindle, jailbreak it with GPT-6 Astra and build KindleCTL, a slideshow app that cycles ten photos. He writes up why passing tests was not the same as working on the e-ink screen.
Had the Fable model work out the music format of his self-playing piano system.
Showed a workflow for reverse-engineering web apps into tools an AI agent can call.
On a tip from another user, he had Claude guide him through jailbreaking his old Kindle in a morning.
The author used AI to reverse engineer the SunnyFit BLE protocol and built a small terminal connector that publishes live workout data to Redis pub/sub for any visualization.
A developer in Bengaluru found Hyundai's official app ugly, reverse engineered his car key and vibe coded his own Mac app. It locks, unlocks, remote starts and sets climate on his Hyundai Creta, even through Siri.
REA (Reverse Engineer Anything) is one MCP server that lets an agent take apart software from app behavior down to native binaries, so you can see a feature you like and learn how it works.
Reverse-engineered a Nokia 110 after Android install failed on 48MB RAM, then ran an AI agent that automates a few actions.
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