Ai-Agents

I’ll admit it upfront: I have a mild, ongoing addiction to trying new AI tools the week they show up, and then finding some corner of my home automation where they might actually earn their keep. Most of them don’t survive contact with reality. This is the story of one that did, and what it cost to get there. The candidate: a decision model, not a chatbot A new model showed up on my usual model marketplace — not a chat model, a decision model. Instead of prompting it with text and parsing whatever prose comes back, you send it a state description plus a set of typed questions, and it hands back a typed answer with a probability attached. No prompt engineering, no hoping the JSON parses. Small context window, and — the number that actually got my attention — a few cents per million input tokens and effectively free output. ...

I recently made a small change to my home automation setup: a robot vacuum that used to start on a rigid 10-minute “away” timer should instead wait until a larger geofence is actually crossed — no more triggering just because someone stepped out to the mailbox. A tiny feature. It should have been a ten-minute edit. It was not, because in this house even the vacuum cleaner has opinions about the security system. ...

I’m starting this blog for a simple reason: I’ve been running my home automation system with an AI coding agent acting less like a chatbot and more like a project lead — reading a backlog, opening pull requests, asking for sign-off on the risky stuff — for months now. It’s been genuinely useful, occasionally broken in genuinely funny ways, and at this point my AI agent has more commit access to my house than most of my actual family. ...