AI DISCLOSURE: THIS WAS BUILT WITH AI
I had the problem. The AI had the keyboard. I defined the idea and the behavior, tested it in Home Assistant, and fixed the parts that tried to become interesting. I am not pretending I hand-coded this. I am saying exactly what it is, because that seems fair. The AI is confident. The AI is not liable.
Alexa was a pretty useful voice inbox for my Bring! shopping list. Then Amazon improved the Alexa+ experience even further.
No. Not really.
With Alexa+, getting something onto the shopping list became unnecessarily awkward. Amazon improved the experience by making the experience require an additional experience. This is progress, apparently. Asking Alexa to open a skill, add something to the list, and then close the skill requires the one thing we do not have in this household: patience and an understanding of stupid decisions.
Maybe the correct setting is hidden behind three menus and a small blood oath. Maybe it is simply not meant to be easy. I did not want to spend an evening negotiating with a shopping-list workflow. I wanted the item to arrive in the right list.
So here is what Hermes actually built for me: a small Home Assistant blueprint that synchronizes one shopping list with another. New items added to Alexa’s list are copied to Bring! and then removed from Alexa. Alexa is the inbox. Bring! remains the list the household actually uses.
That is the whole idea. One list goes in. The other list stays in charge. No new shopping philosophy. No second shopping empire. Just the handoff that Amazon apparently decided needed a small obstacle course.
Alexa is still convenient when I am in the kitchen with wet hands and suddenly remember that we are out of milk, dishwasher tablets, or whatever disappeared since breakfast. I did not want to replace Alexa. I did not want another shopping app. I wanted the voice input to stay quick and the actual shopping list to stay where the household already looks.
So I let Hermes, well, Codex, build a small blueprint for that handoff. It was tested with temporary items in my own Home Assistant setup. It does not fix Alexa+. It just gives the shopping item somewhere useful to go.
The project is here:
This is not a universal answer to every shopping-list problem. It is a small escape hatch for one particularly unnecessary product decision. If it saves somebody else from having a conversation with a shopping list at 10:30 in the evening, it has done its job.