I’ve been a fan of HA literally for decades. Started with X-10 crap and a macOS app called XTension way back in the late 1990’s. It was such a pain in the 
to do anything custom and the reliability was never great. Ultimately with life, kids, etc. it fell by the wayside since I just didn’t have the time or the desire to do what it took to get it great. The “SAF” - spousal approval factor - was always low lol.
Around 5 years ago I started creeping back in just with Apple HomeKit, then adding Home Bridge, and then this year made the leap to Home Assistant (HA). I have Synology NAS systems, so it made launching a vm with HAOS easy. I recommend HAOS since it makes updating it dead-simple. But Home Assistant was still a very complex system and I still didn’t have the time to go deep with it.
And then I discovered the HA MCP server. That literally changed everything. It’s exactly what encouraged me to adopt new systems like Zigbee and Aqara sensors, since I knew it would all be a breeze where I can simply give an agent my intent, and it builds out what I want. Truly a game changer!
I’m now working on a home monitoring agent, whose job it is to watch all systems, learn what’s “normal”, and then report to me anything “abnormal”. We are blessed to have two homes and spend time at each during the year. I’ve replicated the HA systems at both properties and it’s given me huge peace of mind staying on top of everything.
You don’t need to be a geek (like I used to be) to do this. Anyone can! Just ask your favorite LLM how to get started and it will walk you thru all steps. You can even grab screenshots when you have a question and it’ll tell you exactly what to do. Once the HA MCP is running and connected for the most part, you can have your agent (whether it’s Claude, ChatGPT, ThinkOS, or whatever) do the rest.
My SAF is now at all time highs as well 