The home automation project that finally becomes worth doing

A device with an undocumented API can be automated. The harder question used to be whether the effort was worth it.

Simon has been hearing from people using coding agents to reverse-engineer devices around their homes. His observation is that the economics change on both sides: getting something working takes less effort, and a future breakage feels less like an open-ended maintenance commitment.

That second part is easy to miss. An unstable integration may have been possible for years without being worth adopting. If repairing it—or replacing it entirely—becomes cheap, a previously unreasonable personal project can become a sensible afternoon experiment.