Getting the house ready for my AI agents with Home Assistant

Blog post #96

Household lights and devices connected to a small home automation server.

AI-generated illustration.

My AI agents can read my mail, write code and make films. They cannot turn on a lamp. I want to change that, so this week I started getting the house ready, with Home Assistant as the layer between the smart products at home and the agents.

The idea is simple. Home Assistant talks to the lamps, the IKEA hub and whatever else I add. The agents, like Hermes on the old Dell next to my main computer, talk to Home Assistant. Then one place knows about the whole house, and the agents only need to learn one thing.

What shipped

  • Home Assistant is installed. I asked Grok to download it and set it up. It found Docker Desktop on my Windows computer, started it, pulled the image and got Home Assistant 2026.10.1 running in a container, with the Stockholm time zone and the config in its own folder.
  • A plan for the IKEA lamps. My lamps go through IKEA’s Dirigera hub. Grok suggested HACS and a community integration called dirigera_platform, because the official Matter route works poorly in Docker on Windows.

What’s unclear or broken

  • It worked, but it was in the wrong place. I asked Claude if the setup was reasonable. It checked the computer, and Docker was not running at all, so Home Assistant was down. A smart home needs to be on day and night. My main computer is not.
  • Docker on Windows hides the network. Docker Desktop runs containers inside a small Linux virtual machine. Home Assistant then cannot see the home network properly, so discovering devices, Matter and HomeKit work badly. That is the real reason Grok had to pick a workaround for IKEA.
  • No add-ons. The container version of Home Assistant has no add-on store, so things like the Matter server and one-click backups are missing.

Decisions made

  • Home Assistant moves to a machine that is always on. Either Home Assistant OS in a virtual machine on the Hermes Dell, which has to be on anyway, or a small Home Assistant Green box that only does this. I have not picked yet.
  • IKEA goes through Matter, not a workaround. With Home Assistant OS, the hub can be connected with the official integration instead of a community one.
  • The Windows install stays as a test. If I set anything up there, a backup can be moved to the new install.

Tooling & process

  • One agent builds, another one checks. Grok did exactly what I asked, and it worked. But “it works” is not the same as “this is the right place for it”. It took a second agent asking a different question to find that. I think this is a pattern I will keep using when agents set things up for me.

— Stefan