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Show HN: Micasa – track your house from the terminal

micasa.dev

41–50 of 230 posts

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

#41

Any ideas why Claude forces TUI application development?

It's pretty good at building TUIs. Although it's not bad at Swift/macOS either. But really I think the problem is that we don't have a great solution right now for cross platform native UIs that isn't a WebView (or entire Chrome browser), which doesn't feel very native. But every platform has a pretty good terminal now, even Windows.

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

#42

Heck yeah! Love the VisiData shoutout. Echoing other people's desire for a web UI, mostly so I don't have to be the sole Maintainer of the Truth as the only resident household technomancer. EDIT: alternatively, exposing the data/functionality via MCP or similar would allow me to connect this to an agent using Home Assistant Voice, so anybody in the house could ask for changes or add new information.

This is super interesting. I do have a GitHub issue for LLM-powered data entry: "Add a landscaping project to do the backyard. Still ideating, thinking a budget of $40k."

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

#43
post #41

Any ideas why Claude forces TUI application development?

It's pretty good at building TUIs. Although it's not bad at Swift/macOS either. But really I think the problem is that we don't have a great solution right now for cross platform native UIs that isn't a WebView (or entire Chrome browser), which doesn't feel very native. But every platform has a pretty good terminal now, even Windows.

Recently I asked Claude to build a communication tool and TUI was its first proposal. When I had a similar request with ChatGPT previously, it proposed node.js, I assume because there are more examples in its training data.

The pairing of Claude and TUI doesn't seem like a coincidence to me, perhaps there are fewer moving parts that are easy to coordinate?

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

#44
post #27

Thinking of this it would be amazing to have a TUI for home assistant. It's already so good at doing all the nuts and bolts of control and interacting with everything. But its UI is super heavy loaded JavaScript. It doesn't run well on old tablets either for this reason, sadly.

My overall philosophy for (my quite extensive) Home Assistant setup is “amy time a human interacts with the HA UI in any way whatsoever, that is a failure.” I don’t want dashboards, I don’t want a user interface at ALL other than for setting up new automation. The point of HA for me is the house should feel like the correct things happen by magic (and should be essentially unobtrusive and natural).

Oh that's not my philosophy at all. I don't like too much automation because I'm very fussy as to what I want at one moment. It all depends on my mood which home assistant doesn't know. Sometimes when I enter a room I want the lights on, other times I don't, stuff like that. Like when the curtains are open and I'm walking around half naked. And sometimes I just like the dark and sometimes I need bright lights. Sometimes I need heat and sometimes sitting in 16 degrees (C) is totally fine. Yeah I'm weird I know :)

Also I'm really chaotic in terms of schedule. My mood and behaviour changes by the day.

I use it more as a monitoring and control tool.

Not saying your way is bad, it's more as HA is intended. But I'm just saying it won't work for me.

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

#45
post #34
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if you're asking whether micasa should use a text file as its format, or if you're suggesting that a text file can be a substitute for micasa.

The latter. I do things in my house too infrequently that I don't want to have to re-learn the UI of a tool again and again. But maybe I'm not the target audience.

I often find myself wanting answers to questions that require linking data, and I also want to codify those links somehow, so a single-file, row-oriented database seemed like the appropriate way to get that.

You might actually be able to get away with less structure and just dumps thoughts and ideas, statuses, and documents into $AI and have it generate ad-hoc reports.

In which case, a text file might be the right interface.

Kind of a non-answer, I realize.

I suppose the answer is: because I had a relatively specific idea of what I wanted to build and I didn't consider not building it.

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

#48
The same way that Gen Z wants shitty blurry photos of everything, I want more terminal UIs for everyday life. AI isn't going to give us beautiful native swift apps, it just gives us more garbage electron ones. So TUI would be a better aspiration I guess.

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

#50
post #47

I feel like a lot of these types of apps could just be spreadsheets. Maybe a "smart" spreadsheet like Grist[0] executing Python code. Am I off-base there? [0] https://github.com/gristlabs/grist-core

I will say that I am slowly becoming a convert to 'talk to data' approach. Still, it is not without its flaws. At the end of the day, it still requires the user to update stuff and, from experience, this is where I fail and render all those project apps useless..for me specifically.

It sucks, because it sounds like what I really need is for someone to track it for me so that i can just review it if needed.

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