I Built a Smart Home With AI, and Now It Gaslights Me

My house has 801 entities and an AI brain, and last night it couldn’t turn on the porch light. Welcome to the smart home dream.

How I got here

It started innocently. A few smart plugs. Then a Home Assistant Green showed up, and suddenly I was the guy with 52 lights, 70 switches, 25 cameras, and 48 automations. Eight hundred and one entities. I have a spreadsheet-worthy number of things that can betray me.

The dashboards? I didn’t build them. I described what I wanted to an AI and let it do the fiddly layout work while I supervised with coffee. “Put all the outdoor lights together.” “Make a leaving-the-house view.” It was like having an intern who never sleeps and doesn’t judge my 3 AM ideas.

Apple Home vs. Home Assistant: the custody battle

I use both, and they hate each other the way divorced parents hate each other.

Apple Home is the fun parent. Pretty, simple, great with Siri, shows up for the school play. But try to do anything clever and it just smiles blankly.

Home Assistant is the parent who actually raises the kids. Ugly dashboard, infinite power, does everything Apple won’t. My compromise: HA runs the show behind the scenes, and a handful of well-behaved devices get visitation rights in Apple Home through the HomeKit Bridge. The kids seem fine.

Then I gave the house a brain, and it got opinions

I wired OpenAI into Home Assistant, so now the house can reason about itself. Ask it what’s on, whether the garage is secure, what the cameras see — it checks live state and answers like it lives here.

Which is great, until you realize you’ve built a house that can judge you. “There are 14 lights on and nobody is home,” it says, in the tone of a disappointed father. I’m working on the tone.

The night 30 lights ghosted me

Thirty of my 52 lights went dark. Not “off” — unreachable. The app showed them greyed out like they’d died. Automations firing into the void. The Hue bridge just… sulking.

The investigation revealed the usual suspects: some lights physically switched off at the wall (by a human, allegedly me), a bridge having an existential crisis, and two automations I’d disabled months ago and forgotten like bad passwords.

A smart home is never finished. It’s a garden, except the plants text you at midnight to say they’re dying.

The verdict

The house mostly runs itself now, and only bothers me when something genuinely needs a human — which, admittedly, is still most days. But every month it’s a little smarter, a little more reliable, and a lot more fun to argue with.