I love Home Assistant for its ability to connect to every smart device in my home through the same dashboard. That gives tons of flexibility for scheduling and automations, even if I'm not the best at scripting them. To make my Home Assistant automations more useful, I decided to see what Claude would make of my smart home's myriad of devices.

The thing is, Claude didn't just suggest good automations for use. It fixed the ones that were already there. It also fixed a few setup issues that I'd missed, guiding me through each step with ease.

That's fantastic, especially as I hate writing automations in YAML, and I'm going to continue using this in the future. Although I might point my local LLMs at HAOS instead, since this is a relatively simple task and doesn't really need frontier models.

Why would you let AI touch your smart home?

Crafting automations is difficult for me

Home automation is one of the big draws of smart home devices, whether that's setting routines to turn the lights off at a certain time or ensuring devices aren't drawing power unnecessarily when you're not at home. But the fun automations require lateral thinking, and I'm terrible at figuring out the context for when they should run.

But you know what isn't? AI, after all, is designed to surface those connections that you might have missed. Plus, LLMs are good at coding, and I despise creating YAML and Jinja. They're so close to each other, but get the formatting slightly wrong, and it breaks everything, and I hate it.

Time to connect Claude to Home Assistant via MCP

This worked pretty well

While there is an official MCP integration for Home Assistant, it's slightly limited in scope. I used ha-mcp instead, and it worked like a charm once I figured out that my Claude installation had its settings file in a different folder for some reason.

After the short installation was done, and the MCP tools HACS app was added, Claude could read and write inside my Home Assistant virtual machine. After scanning devices, it came up with eight categories like Appliances, Vacuum, Presence, etc, and a few sections of suggested automations to build.

The main automations that Claude suggested include:

• CO2 alert (Office + Kitchen, threshold 1200 ppm)
• Bedtime door auto-lock (fold into Night routine)
• Auto-lock on departure
• Sunset lights (Living Room + Ground Floor, conditional on home)
• Backup-failed weekly alert

Any of these would be incredibly helpful, especially the reminder if backups fail. I think I'm going to add that one and also have it create a similar automation that checks the backup status of devices on my NAS. I really should be paying more attention to that, and doing it manually is a chore.

But it also set up automations to remind me when the washer and dryer have finished their cycles, because I always forget and have to re-run the washer regularly. These send notifications to my iPhone via the HA app, and Claude suggested mirroring those to my older iPhone, adding audio cues and notifications for any errors, just in case that happens.

Maybe this is all fairly standard, but I would have needed hours and hours to comb through the entity lists to find the pieces I'd need to put that together manually, and Claude took seconds.

But it didn't just suggest new automations — it fixed existing ones

Claude Cowork scanned my existing install and noticed multiple issues. One was a misconfigured existing automation I'd set up to turn the lights off and ensure no music was playing on any of the smart speakers after a certain time of night, which it fixed after asking me for permission. Then it followed up by asking about the other broken things in my setup:

A few questions later, both my automatic backups (my Nabu Casa subscription was over, so it was trying to upload to an unavailable location) and the erroneous Decora Wi-Fi entry were resolved.

To be clear, Claude didn't have direct access to files, but it did tell me exactly where to go and what to remove or change. This would have taken me hours to find the correct places to remove and debug if I had been clicking around in Home Assistant.

I'm never going to be stuck for thinking up HA automations again

It's one thing to know what smart devices are in your home, and another thing entirely to know how to cobble them together into useful automation chains. I've always stuck to fairly simple ones because anything complex becomes hard to troubleshoot as APIs and other systems change, but now I have an LLM to guide me.

But it's more than that. LLMs are fantastic at reading logs, understanding the context of errors, and pattern-matching those errors to the official documentation, or finding obscure fixes buried deep in GitHub message chains. Things that would take me hours of searching online get surfaced in minutes, if not less, and then I get guided through the fixes.

And for that, I'll always have an LLM connected to my Home Assistant, even if I'm not using it to replace voice assistants with locally-run options. The time saving alone is worth the cost.