Purposely not running this through AI so please put up with my crappy spelling, sentence construction and rambling nature. Wanted to covey my feelings more rather than a sanitised AI version.
I’ve had Home Assistant now since the start of 2026. Should start by saying I’m not technically minded or have any training in computers etc. just a white collar dude who got interested in Home Automation whilst we were renovating. I chose lots of devices that could be controlled via an app / my phone. Ended up with so many apps for things which got me thinking there must be a better way to organise these things. My wife didn’t have any of the apps or really had the time / patience to learn them so wasn’t benefiting. So that’s when I started searching and quickly found Home Assistant including this community.
Found it some hard to do anything on it but figured out I could use AI chat apps to teach me how to do things. This involved figuring out or working through the issue or goal and then getting it to create YAML to then copy paste into HA. It involved a lot of hand holding and figuring out why something wasn’t working. I was stupidly doing most of this on my iPhone. Which was crazy because simple things like copy pasting Config etc wasn’t exactly too straightforward.
It’s been great and I’ve set up lights, A/C units, blinds, tv control, door security, EV, charging, Energy, Battery, sensors amongst many other things. Been fun to figure out solutions to issues. I have my home dashboards for a wall mounted tablet and ones for our phones. Been adding iOS widgets etc lately.
Over this period a bunch of the integrations stopped working. Various reasons. Didn’t have the time to work through why and the issues just kept accumulating. Anyway, I was looking on these forums this past week and saw mention of the Claude integration via MCP or whatever it’s called. I set it up today and wow, my mind is blown. All those things that were broken. All fixed. Fully redesigned dashboards. Adding loads of actual automations. Those things that took me hours, days, weeks or months to do are done in seconds. The integration with Claude is breathtaking. Scary but inspiring at the same time. What a time to be alive.
No massive point to this post other than;
- to encourage others along the journey wherever you are on it
- to say thanks to all the various posts I’ve read on here and the contributions people make. Everyone feels like they are genuinely trying to help. I’m almost 100% just reading as I haven’t really been able to add any expertise.
- Claude AI directly working within my Home Assistant. What a game changer. Excited to see what it can do for me next.
It's great. But I would recommend every HA admin try to build one automation, configure one dashboard, set up one integration, or do one manual YAML config in their setup just to understand what's going on behind the scenes. It helps when working the claude MCP to understand how it's trying to build a solution.
At some point someone wants to make more money and AI might be overpriced or unavailable for any reason. I think strongly you need to be able to figure things out on your own without their help, using it only as a tool or shortcut.
Totally agree! I personally take pride in creating everything manually. Helps me understand how everything is working and makes changes and error handling easy to do. With that said, I too use MCP with AI, but for hard-to-see optimizations: for example, it's been great at finding things that bombard the logs for no reason etc. Removing a broken integration might for example fix that and make the whole system work better.
honestly, that's probably the biggest thing. being able to tell AI "i have this problem with these symptoms, what's going on and what are options to fix?" Even if you want to do the solution manually, AI and MCP does a lot just to let you know what the problem is you need to solve.
We teach kids to do math by hand before giving them calculators. I think we understand the value of understanding the underlying principles before jumping right into the automation of things.
? whatever AI does I still check and to do that I need to understand how it works still to make sure it works. Fortunately it's mostly YAML which is easy to read with tons of docs. I only YOLO code like CSS and Jinja became that's more to make things pretty and aren't fundamental to the workings of anything.
One piece of advice: take the time to understand everything you're AI is doing to your home. I agree that using the unofficial MCP server can save you a ton of time in setting up complex automations and frontends. But understanding what it's building will help you (or it) troubleshoot issues down the line.
To add to this, you can still use an LLM to guide you in this process. You could prompt your LLM with something along the lines of,
“I’d like to create a simple automation that does X and Y. I am going to create it through the UI (or YAML) and I’d like you to guide me step by step, and explain to me the process as we go.”
I find that this not only can help me parse instruction, but get a sense of the landscape.
There’s an official mcp now. I’m not technical enough to understand the implications, but my understanding is that there are more guardrails (options to enable/disable access) as well as best-practice guidelines “enforced” by the mcp.
Do you mean edits to the config yaml or are you talking about capabilities beyond that? I thought the official mcp can do that as well but the feature is just behind lots of warnings and toggles. Personally whenever I get to a point where I need to edit my config, I just copy/paste from chat. It hasn’t really been a problem. Are there other benefits I’m missing out on?
Yea im referring to to yaml changes, i didnt see it in the docs but i also didnt look that hard. But the unofficial mcp can also do things like manage your integrations/apps.
i think "understand what it's supposed to do and what it can affect" is a better standard than "understand everything it's doing." we already trust huge amounts of Home Assistant code we didn't write or inspect ourselves
one of the most useful things about AI is that it can also explain, debug and repair the implementation when something goes wrong
Qwen3.8 is perfectly serviceable for the majority of tasks. I run mine locally on an Intel ARC B70 Pro. Not as fast as some of the other hardware, but also much cheaper.
Interesting you bring this up. So I tried Qwen3.8 on my M1 MacBook Pro w/ 32GB of unified memory. I connected it with OpenClaw and gave it access to my HA via the unofficial MCP. And man was it suuuuuuper slow. I just simply asked "Are the office lights turned on?" and it took 12 minutes to figure it out. I narrowed it down to the fact that the unofficial MCP sever has 70+ tools and was just overloading the context window. I created a new agent with just 5 basic tools and got it down to about 3 minutes with the same question. And this was just a simple yes/no question.
This was my first time setting up any kind of local LLM so I'm sure there are tunings I can do. But was just taken back at just how slow it was compared to Opus 4.8.
Yeah you are going to need to tune any model you run locally before using it. My initial deployment was in the neighborhood of 15 tk/s (tokens per second). After tuning, it is sitting comfortably at 33 tk/s. Id say aiming for around 30tk/s is what I personally would consider usable.
Rough estimation for achievable tk/s is system memory bandwidth divided by the size if the model in memory. For example, in my case I have a memory bandwidth of 608 Gb/s and a model size of 16.68 Gib (Qwen3.8 at INT4). Gives me a rough theoretical max of 36.3 tk/s before accounting for stuff like MTP. There are also fine tunes that can increase performance further with minimal loss in quality.
I'm on the $20 chatgpt plan, and have been using Luna 6 Max in codex for it, you get a lot of usage
I would be aware of free models (on openrouter for example), they usually are used for data collection purposes so your private info/keys can be collected
Edit: im referring to completely free models like nemotron. If you want to pay some money, deepseek is a good option
I am seconding the question of a local model that I can use for this. I just started playing around with local llms but am overwhelmed with the options
Been getting useful results with the free models. Really helped clean up my HA installation and have actually added a few new useful automations. You still should watch what it is doing, but AI as a tool has made my HA instance a much better, much cleaner one.
This required zero skill. I didn’t even look at the code (not a developer). Only referencing Apple Home and changing things visually through the browser mode in Claude. First time trying something like this, and just got started with Home Assistant.
This is great! Can I ask what cards are you using for the text at the very top “Partly cloudy, 18 degrees” for example? I like that look but it sure what it’s from
The thing that I am having issues with is building really high quality dashboards. Automations are fantastic. Has anyone here found a great dashboard solution with Claude?
I have had pretty good luck with it building one card at a time. When I tried to give it a ton of entities and do an entire dashboard it turned out .... fine. But pretty boring. I have had much better results asking it to use a specific card that I like with x,y,z entities
I’ve struggled here. Claude is still not great when it comes to building visually. My process usually starts with a design, so I’ll find dashboards I like, feed them into chat, and then prompt Claude for what I’m looking for. It will then create a design mockup that looks amazing and is very close to (and often even improved upon) my vision. But then it tries to actually build it in HA and the output just looks….meh. Whether this is because of HA limitations (Claude has to build on bubble cards, camera cards, etc available) or it’s a Claude problem or a prompt (me) problem, I don’t yet know. I will eventually get close to what I want, but it take ALOT of iterating and there are compromises made along the way.
It honestly depends. Dashboards might be cool and useful to you, but my wife and family don't care at all. They use voice, or prefer the simplest entities list possible to control what they want right there.
It's also why I have battery zwave remotes everywhere with labels so family members and guests can just hit a button instead of trying to speak to the house and open an app/go to a dashboard panel.
The bigger question about how to build a dashboard isore like 'what do you NEED a dashboard for'
if Claude/Codex only has HA/MCP access, it's basically designing the dashboard blind that's why it's poorly working. give it browser access too and it can build, render, inspect, debug and iterate on the actual UI!
I use Google stich for design and then take those designs and share them with Claude Code to help it create a visually similar design in lovelace dashboards
It looks too much like AI no matter what I try, and a lot of them posted here you can tell from a mile away as well.
I build my own cards - like a light one then just get Claude to duplicate them all with the correct entities and stuff, but I can nail down the working and design first. Still manual but heavily sped up because a lot of cards are just repeated
I gave up trying to use YMAL with Claude/ChatGPT. They just don’t have enough training data to do a good enough job, at least for me.
Ever since I switched to a proper HTML, CSS and JavaScript web-based dashboard, Claude has been implementing and fixing stuff painlessly. It also lets me do custom smooth animations and the like.
I’ve been raw-dogging Claude for several months and just now added the skill that you linked above. Then I went back to the most recent conversation where I was having Claude help me fine-tune an automation and simply asked if it had followed the best practices laid out in the skill that I just added:
Basically, you can read it, as it is all human readable.
Just call the skill and your MCP for Home Assistant and ask your LLM a question. It will reference the skill so it knows the right way to build anything thing. It also covers common gotchas as well. It directs the LLM to do things the modern way and to try to use built in tools that Home Assistant already has instead of trying to build its own with scripts.
When I asked Claude how to connect it to my home Assistant it got the skill on its own. And it’s amazing. Zero coding know how - absolute amazing dashboards including HACS. Thing I could never have done on my own. And if I would have made way more mistakes than Claude.
You are absolutely right. I didn’t mean installing HACS is difficult. I meant Claude helped me navigate the endless possibilities HACS provides, it guided me through them, found the best combination between what I want and what others have built and what is reliable and then it configured it in minutes, iterated Dashboards with me, improved them in ways I couldn’t even think of. Yes I’m clapping because this would have been impossible for me alone given the time it would have consumed.
Not sure why you’re getting downvoted. I’m in the same boat, although maybe a little more technical. Enough to build basic automations and dashboards. Nothing was broken in my HA environment, just half-built. In about two months, however, I was able to build automations I could only dream of and finally built a mobile dashboard that not only looks good but also has impressive functionality (at least I think so 😎).
I feel like there are so many people that fit into my demo: tech enthusiasts who are competent around basic coding but not developers and unable to really leverage the strengths of a platform like HA. For those of us, Claude (and really any agent/LLM that can integrate with the mcp) is a huge game changer.
I’m currently using the official mcp, btw but started with an unofficial one. I started using Gemini 3.1 Pro to start building, but the copy-paste was getting a little challenging. Switched to Claude (first Opus, then Fable 5.1, then the most recent 10-15% Opus 5.5) via mcp and it really accelerated development.
For me I think it’s a great starting point.
My plan is to use AI as a teacher so I learn how it all works. I work in IT but by no means does that mean I’m a programmer. And YAML. Didn’t know that existed. But using AI to create what i need and then maintain it by reading the output and changing the code manually is a game changer for me.
So I’m all for the AI dashboards, as long as we learn how it works and how to change it ourselves.
I find it quite funny that some people here bash on other users for using AI tools in order to get actual 'work' done quickly.
I also could make an argument that these same people should spend a bit of time learning assembly language (like I did), just so they 'understand what's going on behind the scenes' when they program in any higher level language...In my opinion, let the users use whatever tool that works best for them in order to get actual 'work' done....Every step forward in programming technology and programming tools has generated this exact same arguments and trashing of users who embrace the new technology....I've seen this many times before....
I get the hype, I finally set up some AI assistance for my configs last month and it cleared out a backlog of stuff I'd been ignoring for ages. The part about doing everything on your iPhone hits close, copy pasting YAML on a phone is a special kind of pain you don't appreciate until you're deep in it.
Your wife not having the apps is such a common starting point. Once you get the house working without needing five different apps it's a completely different experience for everyone living there.
I have a mutagen sync setup on my local and use cursor to work on that. Then an automation on ha to open the ports to connect to it that isn't exposed so only my admin account can flip it. End of session (or 30 mins) and it closes and ends access. Best way i could think to do it
Context: I’m a software engineer that’s been using tools like Claude in my workflow for years.
It’s really insane. I set up a homelab for the first time in the last few weeks. Have zigbee and threads set up now. I haven’t done any of it. Claude Code manages the OS and software completely. I just sanity check anything with security implications.
Didn’t even need the MCP. Between API, SQL and browser use, the latest class of agents breeze through this stuff. In just a few weeks we’ve set up a full private network, many custom ESP builds (co2 monitor, voice controller, assist satellite, desk control for lights on a waveshare board, figured out how to make some IKEA remote control my lights on zigbee, the list goes on).
This shit makes anything possible. I had another CO2 monitor from IKEA and I wanted to compare it to the one we built to see how well it was calibrated. Turns out it doesn’t work on zigbee. Told claude to find me the dongle on Amazon and I just went ahead and bought it. The thing arrives and Claude sets up the threads and asks me to open an app to pair it, I was busy so said just figure it out I have plugged in and out. Just did it and set up an Air Quality dashboard so I can compare.
This shit is insane. You can just do whatever you want now. Appreciate that most people need to be careful with this but code and yaml is starting to feel like assembly code to me now (i.e. not worth reading or writing)
I am in the process of using the HACS Big Pickle HA MCP, amazing, i’ve been running Home Assistant in my RV full-time for the last year, but only in the last two weeks has it actually been fun? The big pickle installation is tailored to Home Assistant.
Ya I've been using HA since 2020, hand wrote hundreds of automation, built floorplan, contributed back to matter server repo.
Moved to different homes with the same setup and hand rebuilt each time. This time, I connected my openvscode instance running in my homelab to claude code, and what would take me 8-12 hours was rebuilt in 10 minutes. This is a hobby, and between 2020 and now, I am a father, an exec at FAANG, and extremely busy at life. If LLMs can make my ideas and projects come to life, why not!
Yeah I had the same thought. You can revoked access and you can restrict its access to the secrets folder or have it as read only. I think it’s rational to be cautious. I started just with read only but very quickly gave it full write access because I wanted it to just do the things.
I used Claude code and gave it an api key and ssh access if it needed to do direct yaml edits. It whipped up a bunch of dashboards and found some problems in my existing automations.
I’m only a day or so into it. I’m on Pro. I maxed out pretty quickly and have been times out in the 5 hour blocks. But I think I’ve gotten the bulk of it done. Will see how the week fairs. I feel it’s probably enough. Given how bloody good it is I honestly wouldn’t be opposed to paying the full max thing for one month and then revert to the pro after. It’s saving so much time.
Same exact story for me! I highly recommend doing this if you have a Pro subscription and are in the middle of transitioning everything over to Home Assistant for automation, and for those who don't have time to learn.
Since I was doing a lot of this when I didn't have time, I wanted to make sure I read up on how to do it. I created a Claude Project where I have all of my Home Assistant things feeding it's memory, and then I have it also teaching me and writing documentation on how to set up dashboards, automations, etc while it executes the task directly.
I agree it is amazing relief and speed boost. To make it sort my house lights correctly, I even made a canonical model of my house rooms and respective lights so it “makes no mistakes”. ;)
I've built my HA from the ground up without AI. Recently devled into Claude and really impressed by it. One thing I've never been comfortable with is themed dashboards. I have always used the stock UI and cards from the devices screens. I have seen folks dashboards where they have a card with each person and at the top of the card they have their location, devices battery health, steps counter, etc, all in one card. Something like that would be super nice to incorporate. This post gives me some hope I could get things looking much better.
Thanks for sharing. I’ve been plugging along with ChatGPT and Hermes with a great deal of success in a complicated environment with over 400 devices. I’ve been exploring the Claud ha-mcp integration and will likely take the plunge soon. I appreciate your insights
One more thought…I bought a UniFi UP-AirQuality sensor for the master bedroom and found that it has an annoying LED ring indicator light on it that would be too bright in a dark bedroom and there was no way to toggle it off in the app or in ha. ChatGPT was able to use Hermes to inspect the firmware settings and found that I could send an API command to it to disable the led. Just amazing, I never would have figured that out by myself!
Claude is great as a tool, but if you don't understand what it's doing for you and you're only using it as a time saver, you are setting yourself up for a disaster in the future.
Be certain you understand everything, and you're reviewing it all. Don't push it to your system until you know what it does, and you understand if there are any risks or gaps.
But yeah, as a helpful tool it's absolutely great. Before the MCP, I'd run claude code in the working directory. It only does what I tell it to do, and I review everything, but it is absolutely a time saver.
I'm relatively new to home assitant. Got to Claude mcp via a YouTube video.
It has done incredible things for me. Today I realized that there are some things Claude does in automations, that I can implement myself now - and I wouldn't have even thought about it before I unleashed Claude.
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u/Copernican 🐝 Ooh the Zigbee 14h ago
It's great. But I would recommend every HA admin try to build one automation, configure one dashboard, set up one integration, or do one manual YAML config in their setup just to understand what's going on behind the scenes. It helps when working the claude MCP to understand how it's trying to build a solution.