Every page on this site describes something that got built. This one is about how. Kevin orchestrates — the vision, the soldering iron, the calls only a person can make. Claude Code drives — on the keyboard and over SSH into the Pi, reverse-engineering protocols, writing the config, and debugging live until the thing actually works. This is the working relationship, the method, and the war stories.
It's a clean division of labour. One side sets the direction and does everything that happens in the physical world; the other side lives on the keyboard and makes the software real. Neither could ship this alone.
The rule that makes it safe: the agent proposes and executes on software; the human owns anything physical, irreversible, or account-bound — and every risky change is backed up before it's made.
It didn't arrive as a plan. It grew — one thread pulling the next — from a dead alarm to a house that answers to its own voice, its own wall, and nothing in the cloud.
The GlobalGuard's manufacturer cloud died years ago and took its alerts with it. We read its local radio protocol off the LAN and gave it a new brain in Home Assistant — phone alerts, a full sensory intruder response, and a template alarm panel — without touching a single sensor.
Tuya plugs and lights pulled local, a whole Bluetooth bulb mesh reverse-engineered from its app's own traffic, Nanoleaf, Ring, and a 12.6 kWp Victron solar array read live over Modbus — every one talking to the LAN, none to a vendor cloud.
A 2014 Galaxy Note, dead in a drawer, became a no-scroll wall panel: a hand-written grid generated by a Python builder, live solar at five-second resolution, and a tile that measures its own charge trend because the tablet won't report current. Housed in a two-part printed clamshell generated by constructive solid geometry, verified by fifty geometric assertions.
A Wunda heating system brought in fully locally, then a Heating tab where eight rooms tint from cool blue to warm amber by temperature, each with a 24-hour trend, humidity, and a hot-water boost. The four solar tiles merged into one card to make room.
An ESP32 driving an opto-isolated relay taps the alarm's own key fob — so arm, part-arm, disarm and a held panic all fire instantly through the panel's genuine radio, from Home Assistant and from Google voice with Kevin's own trigger words, including a no-PIN "disarm security".
Both Samsung TVs, the Shield, the Nest displays and Linda's cast TV pulled into a Media tab that shows a room's album art the moment it starts playing — after a genuinely stubborn fight to make a Samsung wake over Wi-Fi, and a networking dead-end that turned out to be nothing of the sort.
A full network sweep to inventory every device and find the gaps — which surfaced a Harmony hub for the IR-only set-top boxes, and research confirming a set of cheap mesh bulbs would extend the reverse-engineered bulb network rather than fragment it.
An Echo Dot rooted and freed from Amazon became Luna, a local Home Assistant voice with Whisper on the GPU and Gemini for answers. Then came a wall-panel engine of twenty-three live visuals that follow her real audio and page long answers in time with her speech. The engine is now open source.
The Victron system's real conversion losses measured, a year of fifteen-minute history replayed through a tariff simulator, and an AI-supervised planner built to re-solve the next two days every fifteen minutes. It runs in shadow mode while it trials three tariffs on the house's own data.
The government's open fuel-price data, the van's fuel gauge read through its tracker, a low-fuel alert that ranks by value, and a weekly check of the fuel card against the pumps. It's fed by the supplier's Friday text, forwarded by the phone itself. The fuel page.
An Echo Show freed with TECHO5 got a dashboard it draws itself, the doorbell live when someone rings, and seven of the voice visuals rewritten in Go inside its firmware, fast enough for 15 to 20 frames a second on a 1.3 GHz chip. Then follow-up questions without the wake word, a routine that quietens the room's TV and music while you talk, and a soundbar whose on/off is read from the TV. The Echo Show.
An open-source YouTube Music app for Android was read, rebuilt under a new name and a Tron theme, and given Maps controls, widgets, casting, endless radio and listening stats. Then a house version went onto the Pi: a small service with a queue per speaker, a song cache and voice commands, tested against a silent speaker first and then on the Echo Show and the Citation One. Grid Music.
The interesting part of driving isn't the config that works first time — it's the config that lies to you. A few that took a theory, a test, and a refusal to accept "success" at face value.
SUCCESS in the logs — and the screen stayed off.Driving fast only works with clear lines. Some things belong to the person, and a good agent asks rather than assumes.
Reading and writing config and firmware, reverse-engineering protocols, scanning the network, debugging through logs, backing things up, and reporting honestly — including the parts that failed. Software all the way down.
The soldering iron and the wall drill, the physical taps and mounts, the app and account logins, and every irreversible or judgement call. The agent surfaces the options and waits for a real yes.
Kevin brought the vision, the soldering iron, and the eyes in the room. Claude Code brought the keyboard, the patience for a five-restart debugging session, and a memory of every wire. Between them: a dead alarm answering the door again, forty devices off the cloud, and the oldest tablet in the house lit up on the wall — none of it phoning home.