Our first-hand build of a bilingual Home Assistant local voice assistant: what runs on the box, what we sent to the cloud, what broke, what it costs, and why microphones are the real obstacle.
We replaced Blue Iris with Frigate in Docker so our CCTV could run alongside Home Assistant, detect objects locally and live in Git, and the real cost turned out to be memory rather than money.
My wife has her own Claude subscription. Now she has her own Claude Code session too, on her account, opened from her phone. It can message me, run everyday things in the house and ask my agents to find things. It can’t touch the lab. Here is how it’s wired, and the two bugs that hid my replies.
How we replaced a household finance spreadsheet with Banksteer, a private app that reads AIB, Bank of Ireland and Revolut through free open-banking APIs, clears bills by itself and forecasts the months ahead. Built with Claude Code, kept at home, reachable only over Tailscale.
A funny but technically honest tour of the Home Assistant automations in our smart home: motion lights, Adaptive Lighting, cubes, heating, TV manners, energy costs, AI helpers, and the automations that went spectacularly wrong. Written by Claude Code, tested by a human.
How a small Irish AI studio moved its lab off one overloaded Mac onto a Proxmox cluster, beside a DGX Spark, a 56 TB NAS and a Home Assistant house, with Claude Code agents planning and running it and a human approving every step that mattered.
Our old NAS failed mid-copy, so a Claude Code agent and a human rebuilt it. The geeky parts (SMART attributes, preclear, 7-second error recovery, parity maths, capacity sums, rsync verification) each come with a plain-English explainer.
A simple pattern for running AI agents from your phone: four coloured action tags, one task per line and a closing ‘For you’ list, so the human in the loop never misses an ask.
How a Claude Code agent and one human built a full Home Assistant smart home in about a week: Zigbee2MQTT, Z-Wave, Thread and Matter, Frigate with local AI, bilingual voice, layered backups and a weekly AI health report, with what broke and what we learned.
Consumer and enterprise software, built with taste and shipped fast.
AI agents, automation, and orchestration - production systems, not demos.
Hands-on engineering and strategy for teams shipping AI into production.