Work · Case study · 3 November 2026
A house with 1,288 devices and 58 automations, written and tested by agents through 78 named tools, with every change approved by a person
Short answer: The founder’s own house runs on Home Assistant. Since September 2026 agents have written the automations, the monitors and a 3D device map, reading freely and writing only with approval and a live test. Not a product; the place our safety rules were learned.
Counts are from the live system on 3 November 2026. Every change in the table has a date and a note on how it was tested. We do not sell home automation; we show it because a house is the hardest place to let an agent act, and the gates built here are the ones a customer’s worker gets on day one.
Updated 3 November 2026
One house, 1,288 devices and sensors, 58 automations, all of it written and tested by agents a person steered
Fact This is the founder’s own house in Atlanta, a 2007 build with a garage apartment, cameras, two thermostats, a dozen smart speakers, hi-fi, irrigation, a robot vacuum, a Halloween light show and a small server rack in the garage. The controller is Home Assistant, open source, on a small box in the house. Counts are from the live system on 3 November 2026 (version 2026.10.4). No customer has bought this; it is where we test what an agent can safely be let near.
1,288 entities, 41 kinds, 29 rooms
453 sensors, 175 switches, 166 door, motion and presence sensors, 52 media players, 23 lights, 11 cameras, 2 thermostats, 1 alarm panel, 1 vacuum, 1 garage door.
58 automations, 29 scripts
55 of the 58 switched on. Lights that follow presence, a bathroom that stays dark at night, outdoor lights on a sunset schedule, a hot-water pump on a winter timetable, a morning sweep that turns off what was left on, a street-water pressure alert.
Monitors that feed back into the house
The NAS, the garage server, the agent box and the uptime checker each show up as a sensor inside Home Assistant, so a box going dark is a notification on a phone, not a surprise.
How the agent reaches the house, and what sits between it and a light switch
What the agents built, dated
| When | What | How it was checked |
|---|---|---|
| 15 Sep 2026 | The tool server with 78 Home Assistant tools, plus a context compressor, moved into a container on the garage box so every agent session starts with the same view of the house. | Tools listed and called from a fresh session. |
| 21 Sep 2026 | Irrigation rebuilt on open Zigbee valves after the previous cloud controller was removed. | Valves cycled from the dashboard. |
| 26 Sep 2026 | Two bathroom sensors (shower humidity, room motion) made to drive one light without fighting each other; thermostats put on a climate dashboard. | Watched through a shower and an evening. |
| 30 Sep to 13 Oct 2026 | A 3D model of the house, built from the 2007 drawing set and the 2010 remodel scans, shown inside Home Assistant with every device on its floor. A voice-and-screen assistant on the garage box answers questions about the house end to end. | Device map walked room by room; assistant asked ten questions on 30 Oct. |
| 1 Oct 2026 | A pre-check script that scans the Home Assistant configuration before each monthly release for things the release notes say will break. | Ran on the October release; nothing to fix. |
| 16 to 19 Oct 2026 | Bathroom night rules (no automatic light 20:00 to 06:30, later at weekends), a morning sweep that turns off 22 listed lights, a Wi-Fi survey node upstairs that reports signal by room. | Each rule watched for a night; the sweep checked the next morning. |
| 26 Oct 2026 | Hot-water recirculation pump on a winter timetable with kitchen boosts, after the summer schedule was shown to waste most of its run time. | Run-time share read from the history graph. |
| Oct 2026 | Halloween: a step on the front stairs seen by the doorbell camera starts a song in the family room and a DMX laser and fog through a small microcontroller. | Tested with a child on the steps. |
| 3 Nov 2026 | Garage office light follows a presence sensor and turns off ten minutes after the room empties; three outdoor plugs on a sunset-to-late-evening schedule with a later Friday and Saturday cut-off. | Walked in and out of the office with a stopwatch; schedule read back from the live config. |
The rules the house taught us, which our customers now get
- Reads are free, writes are gated. The agent can look at any state or history at any time. A change needs a fresh token and a person’s yes in the same session, and the first thing after a change is a live test. The alarm, the locks and the garage door are off the agent’s list altogether.
- Keep the controller boring. Home Assistant runs on its own small box and is only ever asked through its own interface. The agent, its tools and the experiments live on separate boxes that can be rebuilt without touching the house.
- Monitor the monitors. Every box the agent depends on is itself a sensor in the house. When the garage server went dark for a week in October, the dashboard said so; before that it would have been noticed at the next failed task.
- Memory with dates. Every change is written down with the day, the reason and how it was tested, in plain files the owner keeps. The next session reads them first. Most of our bad changes came from a session that did not.
- What went wrong. A smart-speaker integration hit a device limit and dropped rooms; a dimmer moved address when a lease renewed and vanished from the dashboard; a camera feed throttled a small computer until a second radio took the load. All fixed; all written down; none would have been caught without a person who lives there.
Stated Staffbox does not sell home automation. We show this because a house is the hardest place to let an agent act: real motors, real locks, real people asleep upstairs. The gates we built here are the gates a customer’s worker gets on day one: read freely, write with approval, never send, test live, write it down. How it works for a business.
Sources
- Live counts: the Home Assistant system overview read on 3 November 2026 through the tool server (entities, domains, areas, automations, scripts, version).
- Dated work: the owner’s own change notes, one file per change with date, reason and test, kept in the household’s files. Private; dates and summaries are quoted, device addresses and names are not.
- Software named: Home Assistant, ha-mcp, ESPHome, all open source.
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