Home AssistantWhat they did
A 45-year-old Redditor, u/TurbochargeMe, who is good with hardware but does not code, had run Home Assistant for four or five years until automations stopped working, batteries died and a device became unreachable. Weighing a switch to Homey or Apple Home, they instead asked Codex, OpenAI's coding agent, what to do, running it on the ChatGPT plan their company pays for. Codex asked what was wrong, advised them to keep Home Assistant, then worked through the setup: it fixed the dead automations and the unreachable device, got presence detection working, and pulled their Ubiquiti cameras and network and a Pi-hole into Home Assistant with a dashboard. It also suggested and set up things the poster had not asked for and produced a prioritised list of projects that cost nothing.
How it went
The poster says Codex fixed everything that was broken and went further, adding warnings for batteries under 10 percent, unreachable devices, failed automations and available updates, plus a daily backup to their NAS. They report the setup is reliable again and that they are no longer thinking of switching away from Home Assistant. No time or cost figures are given.
Worth knowing
Commenters say Home Assistant's openness is what lets the agent read and rewrite the configuration, and several drive it through the Home Assistant MCP server rather than copy-pasting YAML. The poster notes the agent first tried to walk them through steps by hand, then offered to open a browser and have them sign in themselves so passwords were not shared with it. One commenter warns that a work-paid ChatGPT plan can let the employer see what it is used for.