A writer gave Claude the keys to his smart home, and it got complicated

A tech writer gave an AI assistant the key to his smart home, and it could then flip real switches. Yadullah Abidi of MakeUseOf handed Claude Code, an AI tool that works on code, a long-lived access token for his Home Assistant setup. Home Assistant is the program that runs his lights, plugs, cameras and other devices.

What changed

Before, Claude could write settings code for a dashboard, but he had to paste it into Home Assistant and test it himself. A token works like a key that lets one program talk to another. With it, Claude could inspect his setup, run actions, create automations and work on changes meant for his actual home.

What the AI could touch

• Check sensors around the home
• Switch lights and plugs, and adjust brightness and colors
• Toggle camera helpers and send notifications
• Control his 3D printers

The writer points out that this is a bigger job than producing code snippets. A wrong answer can quickly turn into a wrong action, and he gets no chance to catch it while copying code by hand.

Limits that still apply

Access still follows Home Assistant's user permissions. A token is also not the same as an SSH password, which is a separate login for reaching a server directly and needs its own credentials. Pushing code needs a way to deploy it, not just a token. The experiment combined Home Assistant access with Claude Code's ability to work on the configuration. It did not turn a token into unrestricted server access.

Where it got messy

The first project was a dashboard for Frigate, camera software. The dashboard was not the real problem. An Nvidia driver mismatch had silently knocked out Frigate on his server. He also hit authentication problems, an outdated Home Assistant integration and video-decoding issues with his camera.

Keeping the troubleshooting in one conversation saved him from copying results between windows. It still was not a clean, one-shot task. There were broken parts, revisions and compromises, and the camera eventually came off his main dashboard.

What it built

For his main dashboard, Claude offered three designs, and he mixed elements from all of them. Claude then created an office dashboard and a touch-friendly mobile version in a single prompt, because it could already see his devices.

His AC power monitoring dashboard also became a household rent calculator. It splits rent, househelp, water and electricity charges among him and his flatmates, using smart plugs to track AC use. It counts each person's AC usage from the previous month. It adds a payment confirmation button, overdue warnings tied to the rent due date, and a monthly electricity screen with month-end estimates.