A lot of the “automation” we can buy is a joke: it should be unobtrusive and provide actual quality of life improvement and it’s not. Turning on a light shouldn’t require us to interact with an app on our phones.

HA with some good hardware choices does that if you don’t mind putting in the work up front. Most of my automations require no interaction to work: they passively check conditions and trigger automatically – if I’m home, leaving, need to wake up for work, etc.

I work every 3rd day, so for an odd schedule it’s nice. I set up Home Assistant to look at my calendar.

The safe word is “Torvalds”.