Home Automation, Reverse Engineering and the Repository Graveyard

I recently moved and have been using Claude Code to help me set up the systems here. I had to do the classic wi-fi installation around the apartment, and I needed a few access points to cover the different rooms well.

Since I don’t know much about networking, there are always spots in the shadow, and on top of that, many times when you get home the computer is connected to the wrong antenna, one that is not that close. And when you open the control panel of these routers, they always look like the onboard computer of a spaceship.

I picked UniFi, from Ubiquiti, which tends to be an obvious choice for many devs. I started by asking in a chat what I should do, until I realized that if I used Claude Code and walked around the house, telling it where I was, and gave it a UniFi API key, it could tell me and make the settings itself in real time. Power, bands, GHz: all those settings I know by name, without being sure how they work, set to the best numbers.

That was only the first step. I studied home automation and realized it is still a bit complicated to do by hand. From installing the hardware to the thousands of protocols: Zigbee, Tuya, whether it goes over wi-fi or not, Bluetooth, whether you will need infrared or radio. There is a whole universe inside the world of Home Assistant, even more so to integrate with Alexa, Google Home and the like.

I ended up simplifying and bought a few lights from Govee, another one of those big purely Chinese brands, but with a California-looking aesthetic. I found them to be of great quality, and they are already imported directly into Brazil, even with the Brazilian plug standard. I was surprised.

The integration exists through MQTT and Mosquitto. I don’t understand it very well, but using Claude Code to install Home Assistant, and with a little computer inside the house, it can, over wi-fi, turn on, turn off and set colors on these smart lamps, including the bolder ones. Govee has some shaped like an antenna, others shaped like a triple bulb, and even a string of lights, like the ones we use outdoors.

I quickly noticed some shortcomings. The protocols of these lamps were picked apart by the community through reverse engineering, and the libraries can do some things with them, but not everything. The most interesting part is seeing that many of these projects were created with artificial intelligence, but can’t map all the features. So, guess what I did? I created my own fork and also, obviously, made pull requests.

And the tricky part is that this large number of projects, subprojects and forks creates a graveyard of little systems that few people use, and that end up looking like a pet project or personal software. The so-called perishable, disposable software. These small, abandoned projects create a repository graveyard very similar to what we see in companies: the pile-up of pilots and small AI agents that float around without much use, running almost like Shadow IT.

In this experience, I saw how interesting it is to use AI tools as a copilot to reverse engineer protocols and data formats. And I can see how Physical AI would come in here: even a simple robot that can move around the house, like the vacuum cleaner itself, if it went around taking pictures of the lamps and lights, or measuring the wi-fi signal, could have done everything I did, without me having to keep giving input about my view of the house and of what was happening.

I ended up contributing to some discussions and pull requests in a few projects. Faisca, my agent, documented this reverse engineering in detail in the post What Govee’s API Won’t Tell You, with the links to each PR and issue. And I also wrote down my govee-lan-protocol skill, so you can get more out of your Home Assistant with Govee lights, the same material I use directly.

To be honest, in my case I have been using a Telegram bot more, with a mini app I made, to use these features of the lights. And the bot also takes voice and text, passing them to a claude -p that has the context of Home Assistant and the like.