Smart Homes Are Terrible • Hacker News Board

Re: Smart Homes Are Terrible

#11

Post by joshstrange » Sun, Feb 08, 2026, 8:06 PM UTC

f30e3dfed1c9 wrote: post #10

joshstrange wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the way. Everything must fail back to "dumb", not "unavailable". Smart Switches are a huge QoL improvement IMHO and if Home Assistant goes down, you can still use everything like normal. Fans/lights should be voice/app controllable but also have wall/remote controls. Any guest in the house should be able to navigate it without knowing anything about the smart features. Progressive enhancement, if you will. I…

"Also, having the garage open/door unlock as you pull up feels like magic, and I never get tired of it." I pull into my driveway, press a button on a $15 remote, and the garage door is opened by a thing that is worth about $200. Nothing "smart" about it, and hard to see how being "smart" would improve it. I get that some people seem to like the idea, but I have just never really understood the appeal of "smart home"…

It's just 1 more thing I don't think about. Like walking up to my car and it auto-unlocking when I put my hand on the handle. As I pull up to my house, the garage is opening and I pull right in. Same with auto-locking the door, I just close it and it will lock behind me. I like little bits of "magic" sprinkled into my day.

Re: Smart Homes Are Terrible

#12

Post by pseudohadamard » Mon, Feb 09, 2026, 5:07 AM UTC

f30e3dfed1c9 wrote: post #10

joshstrange wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the way. Everything must fail back to "dumb", not "unavailable". Smart Switches are a huge QoL improvement IMHO and if Home Assistant goes down, you can still use everything like normal. Fans/lights should be voice/app controllable but also have wall/remote controls. Any guest in the house should be able to navigate it without knowing anything about the smart features. Progressive enhancement, if you will. I…

"Also, having the garage open/door unlock as you pull up feels like magic, and I never get tired of it." I pull into my driveway, press a button on a $15 remote, and the garage door is opened by a thing that is worth about $200. Nothing "smart" about it, and hard to see how being "smart" would improve it. I get that some people seem to like the idea, but I have just never really understood the appeal of "smart home"…

A friend of mine's place is fully automated via HA. It's like living in a haunted house. Everything switches itself on and off or locks and unlocks or starts and stops via a bunch of magic triggers and timers and Node Red scripts that he's spent about a year fiddling with and still keeps finding edge cases where things go wrong. Each time it happens it's hours of debugging trying to figure out why the EV isn't charging or all the stuff in the house that's been automatically turned on is drawing 120% of its power budget or the garage isn't locking itself despite his wife having done the right silly-walk three or four times over. And even when it's working it's a madhouse, because everything is automated you're never certain whether something has been reliably activated or not, and every time I'm there it's "X hasn't happened, honey are you sure you did Y?".

The worst thing about it is that it removes the sense of agency (if you're not familiar with that, and I hate giving Wikipedia as a reference for anything but most of the writing on it otherwise is academic papers, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense_of_agency). That's the very reason why we have placebo buttons in elevators and street crossings and progress bars that indicate nothing, it's to provide the sense of agency that we require.

Re: Smart Homes Are Terrible

#13

Post by pseudohadamard » Mon, Feb 09, 2026, 5:27 AM UTC

sethadam1 wrote: post #3

Here's what I think is the original post, without the paywall. https://world.hey.com/jason/the-big-regression-da7fc60d

Interesting discovery! Looks like someone at the Atlantic saw the original post and asked them to rewrite it as an article. It's also interesting seeing the change in style when it goes from blog post to serious-media article.