Comment by nryoo
6 hours ago
$180/month to control your lights and music. A Raspberry Pi + Home Assistant does this for $0/month and doesn't exfiltrate your home network topology to a third-party API. The value proposition only makes sense if your time is worth more than your privacy.
The comparison to smart home gadgetry seems apt to me. I actually want to hack on something LLM agent-related to practice what is clearly a marketable skill, but I can't find anything I'd actually want it to do for me in my real life, other than maybe sort my emails for me, but there's no way I'm going to pipe every one of my emails to an LLM company.
I remember circa 2015 all my nerdy colleagues were going wild with home automation stuff, and I felt like I wanted to play with it too at first. But then I started to observe that these guys weren't spending less time than me turning on their lights. They were spending way more time than me, in fact, tinkering with their thermostats and curtains. I'm perfectly happy hitting a light switch when I walk in the door.
I can't envision one of these Telegram bots reliably completing tasks for me. Maybe the closest one would be what I've seen in this thread. Downloading torrents and putting them in Jellyfin for me, but really, I don't hate curating my own media collection.
> my nerdy colleagues were going wild with home automation stuff [...] I wanted to play with it too [...] these guys weren't spending less time than me turning on their lights
Yep. The IoT home automation stuff is still less performant than much older, wired solutions where whole systems were designed at once in a set-and-forget mode and didn't have weird sync issues or delays. I remember seeing the 'home of the future' exhibit at Epcot like 20+ years ago and these IoT setups are often still a total joke in comparison because of all the protocol issues and fiddling with various interfaces needed.
Just like how the analog wired POTS phone systems were more performant in many ways than pretty much any IP based voice setup.
I simply got tired of messing with stuff that kept breaking in unexpected ways. It wasn't saving time, it was adding a lot of totally unnecessary stress and actually taking time away from me-- for little more than an occasional spark of novelty. Being able to use voice accurately & repeatably for simple task requests is probably the only standout advancement.
My 'nerdy colleagues' and myself can get a lot of enjoyment out of tinkering with this new agentic hotness. However, very few of us I think are really getting something that's actually saving us time in the long run (at least in our personal lives), and it's going to take a while to figure out what's actually realistically reproducible toward that end at a reasonable cost.
This comparison is dishonest, and you know that it is. This is coming from someone that uses Home Assistant and wouldn’t touch OpenClaw with a 10 foot pole. If I had a horse in this race it’d be your horse, but to pretend that these achieve the same goals is just… not in the spirit of an actual discussion.
As someone who has openclaw and HA. HA can very much do alot of what I do in OpenClaw but would take more initial work but would be better in the long run.
Kindly elaborate? Coming from someone who still uses AI mainly to draft emails and raspberry Pi as sandboxed automation project.
I have the voice assistant on Mike hooked up to Claude and it does most of the things I’d want OpenClaw to do.
I’m not generally interested in having it read my email or calendar. I have a digital calendar in the kitchen, and I rarely get important email. I do really enjoy being able to control my house by voice in natural language. I had it set all my lights to Easter colors a while back in a single instruction.