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Show HN: Micasa – track your house from the terminal

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Re: Show HN: Micasa – track your house from the terminal

#111

Post by cbull »

matthewfcarlson wrote: post #60

I built something somewhat similar to this that's web app based (honeydew) but it's much more focused on DIY and doesn't include any of the quote/contractor stuff. It's absolutely focused on powering through a huge pile of todos from a home inspection with dependency tracking as well as remembering stuff (when was the last time you empty the washing machine filter). It practice it alternates between annoying thing I…

Do you have a link to the app? There's way too many hits searching for honeydew online...

Re: Show HN: Micasa – track your house from the terminal

#112

Post by PunchyHamster »

candiddevmike wrote: post #28
fudged71 wrote: post #11

I think/hope the whole "home manager" category is going to take off soon. On a cost basis, it no longer makes sense--practically--not to use visual/text/audio intelligence to manage such a large asset. We just don't have the user-friendly mass-market interfaces for it just yet. It's possible to scan every manual, every insurance policy, ingest every local bylaw. It's possible to take a video of your home and transfor…

We've been building https://homechart.app for years (without GenAI...) and folks just don't realize that home managers exist as an app. They're too used to single purpose solutions, so they don't think to look for more comprehensive options. There's also the inherit struggle of being everything for everyone with an app like this, and focusing on features 80% of your users want and leaving the other 20% niche features…

It's just hard sell vs the free of just having a spreadsheet

Re: Show HN: Micasa – track your house from the terminal

#113

Post by datakazkn »

The hallucination-in-analysis problem is real and often undersold. Pattern that works well: use the LLM only to structure already-extracted data (parse fields, normalize formats), then apply deterministic logic for anything numerical. That way the LLM is doing classification/extraction where it's reliable, and you're not trusting it to compute or compare values where it isn't.

Re: Show HN: Micasa – track your house from the terminal

#114

Post by cpcloud »

small_model wrote: post #67

It think this could be extended to other areas, like car (services, new lease etc), health (dentist, doctor etc), vacations, tax, banking... Basically a personal assistant like app that handles "life".

Yep, I have a few open issues about this. Cars and tools were next on my list.

Re: Show HN: Micasa – track your house from the terminal

#115

Post by cpcloud »

marxisttemp wrote: post #64

I wouldn’t want to use a terminal-only tool with no affordances for cloud sync for home management, something that inherently is likely to involve all members of a household who are likely not all proficient with terminal usage. You should ask your LLM to make something that can run as a home server and have different clients. I also personally wouldn’t trust the database of all my important home info to a vibe-coded…

Reasonable stance.

Re: Show HN: Micasa – track your house from the terminal

#117

Post by kadrian12 »

This is quite cool. Makes me philosophical: isn't it odd, that this is like an Excel template? Like a "domain model" template? In this case, presented nicely in a TUI that makes basic CRUD workflows work.

Most SaaS companies are just that: 1) Curated domain model (stored in their cloud db) 2) Some way for users do to almost raw CRUD on the tables 3) Curated high-level domain specific workflows that do n CRUD calls underneath

So many of these SaaS apps could have been a simple Excel / domain model template like Micasa.

But it seems like we haven't "cracked" the perfect UI on top of relational DBs.

Excel: Good: raw CRUD. Bad: too many degrees of freedom + the possibility to edit the domain model itself. That's too much for most users.

TUI: Good: raw CRUD with some guardrails, limited possibility to adjust the domain model / not by accident. Keyboard shortcuts, for professionals. Bad: inaccessible for non-tech end users + hard to build good UX for high-level domain specific workflows.

Full Web UI: Good: accessible for all. Great for high-level domain-specific workflows. Bad: looks and works different every time. Raw CRUD possible, but always a compromise with editable data grid libraries.

Re: Show HN: Micasa – track your house from the terminal

#118

Post by lanyard-textile »

candiddevmike wrote: post #97
rocketpastsix wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I checked out HomeChart, and boy howdy it feels like its doing way too much.

Thank you for ironically proving my point, I guess. The main value add here is everything is integrated into one app. I always wonder if folks said the same thing when Salesforce or SAP were created. Anyways we document our reasoning here: https://homechart.app/docs/explanations/architecture/#separa...

Kindly -- I think this is a symptom of the larger issue, right?

You shouldn't need a document to help persuade the consumer (or the more technically inclined ones anyway). That magic should just be self evident. We don't need a document to understand why the iPhone was a hit, right?

Doesn't matter if you have the greatest app in the world. If it overwhelms the user on first use, it's simply not going to be used.

I agree at first glance it is overwhelming unfortunately.

Re: Show HN: Micasa – track your house from the terminal

#119

Post by big_toast »

reconnecting wrote: post #22
cpcloud wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's that TUIs feel manageable with an agent. They can be well scoped without a ton of effort, which at least for me makes me a tiny bit more comfortable letting them write code.

It feels like something to do with front-end development limitations. I noticed a wave of TUI applications, all written by Claude from the initial commit.

I started a golang TUI last summer with Codex Web/Cloud because it felt more like a closed loop. It was able to manage pretty well end to end.

Every additional complexity hop probably increases the attrition rate for successful development, so TUIs end up the most frequent bean to bar currently possible for hobbyists.

I really wanted an iOS app. I considered a web app, or a localhost app. Each additional hurdle (containers, packages, builds, testing, running, OSes, browser integration, computer use) feels like upping the required power of the models.

Re: Show HN: Micasa – track your house from the terminal

#120

Post by kayge »

cpcloud wrote: post #38
thomascountz wrote: post #23

files are stored as BLOBs inside the SQLite database, so cp micasa.db backup.db backs up everything – no sidecar files SQLite is just so cool. Anyway, this whole project looks amazing. I can't wait to kick tires (and then track when I last changed my tires... wait, can it do that?!)

One of my first thoughts after getting a working prototype was: "Doesn't the car battery need to be replaced?" So, yeah. This would obviously be called micarro.

And for doctors appointments... micuerpo!
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