No that’s the developers AI rules.
AFAIK the forum AI posting guidelines have not been made public yet because our community manager ( @MissyQ ) is a slacker 
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Yeah that is the OHF Github document I mentioned. It’s clearly scoped to contributing code to Open Home Foundation projects, and even there it accepts and acknowledges AI’s role in project management, outside of coding. I’m not sure how it would apply to the OP at all.
What link are you referring to exactly?
See Tom’s message. I only have a link to a closed post Missy put out where people could comment on the draft… From March.
Between Missy becoming an ex-patriot and OHF Legal, it has not been released.
I think they were not necessarily “wrong” and they were making reasonable conclusions based on the world they could see at that moment.
The smartphone is out of predication, and internet itself did not suddenly become magical; it was the combination of broadband, mobile computing, sensors, and new interfaces that changed the relationship between people and information.
I am wodering if AI may follow a similar path. The current excitement around large models may not be the final form. The more interesting question is what happens when intelligence becomes embedded into everyday environments — homes, tools, interfaces, and physical spaces.
Maybe the future AI moment will not be a chatbot window. Maybe it will be something quieter: intelligence becoming part of the environment we live in.
I think you’re in right concern. Accessibility and ownership don’t have to be opposites.The early internet became powerful not because everyone learned to write HTML, but because people were eventually given better tools to create, explore, and participate. The question for smart homes maybe not they should become easier. easier for whom, and who remains in control? so A good interface should reduce complexity without hiding ownership.
Actually, I also think this is a very natural stage for HA as it grows. Just like a big tree, it is normal that more branches appear.
In the early days, most HA users were people who enjoyed going deep into the system. They were comfortable with YAML, hardware, wiring, protocols, and building things by themselves.
But as HA becomes more popular, more normal homeowners are starting to use it. For many of them, they don’t really care how everything is implemented behind the scenes. They just want their home to work, and they want it to be easy to control.
I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing. The real challenge is how to make HA easier for more people while still keeping the spirit of openness and control that made HA special in the first place.
Maybe this is the same challenge that many technologies face when they grow from a small community into something used by millions of people.
I think this is actually one of the most important questions around AI.I agree that there is a lot of hype and speculation around AI right now. We probably won’t know which parts will become truly valuable until the dust settles.This is also why I think local AI is so important. It doesn’t necessarily mean rejecting cloud AI to run open source LLM, but having another option: running models locally at home, on personal hardware, or through private servers.For daily applications, such as smart homes,the ability to keep data local, avoid depending completely on external APIs, and have predictable long-term access may matter more than having the biggest model available. Maybe the future will not be “cloud AI versus local AI”. Perhaps we will need both: powerful cloud models when we need them, and local intelligence for the things that belong to our private spaces.
Reality check: AI at the moment is a financial phenomenon. Development is driven by individuals wanting to become obscenely rich. Most discussion of the subject is speculative.
An example. In the UK there are currently 315 datacentre projects queueing for permission to connect to the national grid, representing 73GW of demand. The entire country’s peak energy demand is around 45GW. (The Guardian yesterday.) The highest peak recorded was 61.5GW, driven by cold winter conditions in 2007.
This is nonsense. Most of those projects will never happen and the players know it.
The same applies locally. Enthusiasts may spend hundreds of pounds (thousands @NathanCu?) on cards with Nvidia chips, but more people (look around the forum) are concerned with getting motion sensors for less than £10.
Something else will nudge the conversation sideways. The excitement over AI will fade and it will become the domain of therapists and online retailers. Nothing personal, you understand. I’m not predicting a Butlerian jihad. I wish you well. 
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Haha, I think you’ve hit on something important.
There’s definitely a huge financial race happening right now. Investors expect quick returns, companies are competing for bigger models, and the amount of money and electricity being poured into AI is astonishing.
It also creates some strange market behavior. GPUs become incredibly expensive, and even older hardware suddenly becomes valuable again because people discover they can run local LLMs. Here in the Home Assistant world, many of us are trying to do the opposite—seeing how much we can achieve with a Mini PC, an N100, or even older hardware.
Personally, I don’t think AI will succeed if it remains something only large companies can afford. If it’s really going to become part of everyday life, it has to become inexpensive, local, and accessible.
The internet followed a similar path. In the beginning, it was expensive, slow, and surrounded by security fears. Few people imagined it would become ordinary infrastructure. Looking back, many of those problems were eventually solved—not because they disappeared overnight, but because the technology matured.
I’m probably optimistic by nature. I think AI will eventually become much smaller, much cheaper, and much more private than it is today. For me, local AI isn’t just a technical preference，it’s what makes that future possible.
Have to disagree there. The Internet became ubiquitous (“matured” is a bit disingenuous) because companies realised they could make megabucks out of it selling stuff cheaply to their customers and then selling information about their customers to each other.
Internet overheads are trivial; AI overheads are eye-popping, but users haven’t noticed yet because costs are being absorbed by providers, none of whom has made a profit yet. (As usual in a gold rush it’s the people who sell the shovels who are making money - cloud providers like AWS.)
Meanwhile, in everyday life, us humble folk get… um… recipes? Shopping lists? A voice to tell us we’ve left the lights on?
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Can we all just Stop please?
- AI is not the second coming.
- AI is not here for all of our jobs. Will it change the market fundamentally. Yes. Do we know how yet. Absolutely not.
Now I want to be CRYSTAL CLEAR here most frontier models as of this month (July 26 for future readers) can ABSOLUTELY take control of a pc and do practically anything that computer can do. Welcome to tool use agents. So if you still believe all this AI stuff is hooey… You’re about to be very VERY disappointed.
Yes it offers value.
Is the value comparable to your use case and price? No clue… Only you can determine if that’s the case. Yet.
No, most companies and individuals have ZERO IDEA HOW TO extract that value. Until they freely understand we will continue to hear ‘there’s no value’ and it’s expensive.
To some it’s valueless because they see thousands to turn on and off a light. Yet they’re not looking at the rest of that VERY same stack that is also acting as…
Executive chef
Innkeeper
Logistics manager
Pool technician
Personal assistant
Cruise director
…and party planner.
Any ONE of those jobs is worth hundreds of dollars to someone and the value of any one of those jobs is worth the squeeze. And if I told you you could pay once and get ALL of those jobs?
^ that’s the economy you have to compare. It’s not designed to do unicorn pics and turn on and off lights. It’s for offloading entire classes of work humans don’t do well or don’t want to do.. Can you say inventory? Yeah… NOBODY likes doing inventory.
Does it work yea. Right now I could show you any or all of those jobs on rather commodity hardware.
What doesn’t help is a wall of hallucinated text from just asking an agent. Hey. Write me a web article about why AI is good. Next time how about we all research our points, consider our theorums and write out an article framework and not delegate the entire job to an LLM without editing its result, yeah?
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Huh. Don’t you just hate it when the grown ups get home. 
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Having watched man walk on the moon, live from our neighbours scrolling B&W TV, whacking it every now and again to keep it going as the picture tore up, to looking up outside at the full moon last night, the StarLink constellation of satellites and International Space Station, the meteor showers, all visible as the sunlight fades, thinking that space walks are now routine and don’t even make the evening news any more. Witnessing Skylab fall out of the atmosphere and burn up, the flashing bits too colorful to describe to you but fixed in my memory clearly. Yes, space is hard, but now routine. Rockets go up every day. Satellites go past every few minutes, keeping the StarLink constellation active, bringing Internet to everybody globally.
Y2K being the end of the world as we know it. Planes falling out of the sky? Yes, I rode that boom, at $600 per hour consultancy fees, who wouldn’t? Got my COBOL and Fortran textbooks out from my college days when I got new Y2K certification in 1998 that impressed potential customers, wary of employing code cowboys. Yes, rewrote old code going back to the punchcard era, some source rescued from dusty 8" floppies, adding two digits for YYYY/MM/DD, recompile, convert data, and maybe fix a few spelling mistakes and bugs if I had time, or exporting existing data into new accounting packages so no historic data was lost before rushing off to the next project. All my customers survived. Some that balked at my consultancy fee and didn’t convert didn’t survive, eaten by their competitors as their cashflow died as their obsolete and corrupted invoicing system crashed and burnt. No planes fell out of the sky, but many of my friends postulated there may not have been many in the air at midnight crossing, as we sat around the campfire, outside our tents in the wilderness, many miles away from anything technology (we weren’t taking chances, and it was a good excuse to get out and have a hike) in the Blue Mountains, a cold drink in hand counting down the seconds to New Year, and emerged later the next day to over-friendly flies and curious kangaroos, and the sun coming up in the east the same time as yesterday. Yes, defining four spaces for your date is now routine, but the looming Linux 2038 rollover bug is ever present in embedded systems, as is the ten bit 1024 weeks GPS rollover bug that brought Telstra to it’s knees a few weeks ago is still raw in the collective Australian memory.
Visiting friends and distant relatives in Hungary, asking if the village phone (there were two, one on each end of the village), can support dialup for my luggable 12" laptop running XP SP3, dialup modem a plugin card, modified with clips to jumper onto non-RJ11 wall outlets, being steered by suspicious and puzzled villagers to the head office of the local Telco in the city for answers, an hour away by village bus. Excitedly invited to their skunkworks in the basement once I explained to the receptionist why I was there, the 19" racks to house their newly anticipated internet equipment stacked in the corner, unboxed. Reading the Cisco manuals that I recently got my CCNA credentials for, and explaining to the excited tech who spoke broken English some of the pitfalls to expect when configuring it. (Hi Zoltan - your English is now exemplary, decades later, and my Hungarian still limited to about thirty words, Google Translate now doing the hard work in real time). Being invited back for the next week, to be gratefully awarded internet customer account #3, internet access for life (the #1 being for the CEO, and #2 for Zoltan) as we excitedly brought up the internet, carefully copying the network route tables fresh off the fax into the console, rebooting, catching up on FidoNet chatter and e-Mail from my distant customers, as well as sending the first outbound email from their organisation. Yes, the email mailbox I got there is still current (I check from time to time when telling the story to open-mouthed teenagers), surprisingly low spam count, I still have gratis unlimited access when I visit Hungary, but for the millions of devices now connected to that Telco, now internet access is routine, the village landlines replaced by a communications tower skilfully hidden inside the meadieval church belfry, accessible via 5G and WiFi LAN booster, shared amongst the thirty closely huddled houses that comprise the village, the modern autobahn and fiber optic line passing a mile away, regaling it back to sleepy hollow status, ducks, pigs, and passing Gypsy wagons now dominating what used to be the main highway. The villagers, plowing the dark fertile flatlands in a wooden plow behind their horse like their ancestors have done for millenia, pause to pull their cell phone from their jacket, to answer a call from their wife to come home as lunch is ready, a daily routine, my incredulity notwithstanding how much things have changed in the thirty five years since they watched me, most of the village huddled around, a candle held high, connect my laptop to the bare wires where they emerged from the mud wall, the squeal of the modem connect sequence, and magic letters appearing on the screen, just to collect my email and respond to distant customers and vendors, all at 75 bits per second.
The lure of BitCoin, watching the prices soar, day by day, hour by hour, and BlockChain, an entire wave riding on the share market funding boom.
The shine of BitCoin has been diluted with alternate coinage being minted, even by carrot-topped tyrants, and the pangs of regret the first dozen or so coins you minted for lulz are lost forever when you reformatted your hard drive to reinstall Windoze Vista yet again. Having ‘blockchain’ on your cv doesn’t command a five figure boost to your starting salary (remember the stupid job adverts - must have seven years experience for senior blockchain administrators at the height of the boom?) BitCoin still exists, a little down from the heady peaks, the early adopter billionaires still around, a psuedocoin ATM in the local shopping mall, but what happened to BlockChain? It’s now a subroutine you add to your code as an include with a robust API and casually mention during your code walkthrough as ticking security requirements. It has become routine, a tool used to reassure customers their data remains intact when stored or transmitted.
The lane assist technology that swerved the vehicle away from drifting into another car when my aunt fell asleep driving home after a wedding? The demo ride on a factory prototype pre-release Tesla 3 with debug version of self drive and insane mode freshly installed, heart pounding, pulling away, eerily silent, from the kerb and stopping at the traffic lights, hands off the wheel, waiting for the turn arrow to turn green, passengers and technicians filming, all sensor data and video live streamed back to the labs in real time, aware there may be many more watching elsewhere. Being in the fast lane and wondering how it would manage to cross six lanes to the special toll lane for electric cars, and watching it, heart in mouth, as it aggressively pushed in front of others, anticipating gaps in traffic on the screen far bolder than even I would risk, to make it there with spaces to spare, and merge again at the other side, arriving in time for my dinner appointment and presentation. Now you respond with voice when it asks ‘where to’ as you climb in, and pulls up to park right next to the recharger when it arrives at home, self interest paramount. All routine
Thumbing through the map you pulled out from under the passenger seat as it has become too bulky to fit in the glovebox? Driving to a well recommended new restaurant out of town when interstate, your companions’ i-Junk Apple Maps confidently telling you to turn right from the freeway to a country lane, when there is no exit, just an overpass there and a thirty foot drop in the darkness, and there in the stopping lane, cars rushing past, vowing to use Google maps henceforth. Now Google maps asks fastest or cheapest when there are tolls on your trip, remembering your response. All routine
The promise of plug and play, watching a demo of newly minted windoze crash and burn when a USB driven printer was plugged in, in front of industry heavyweights. Now expecting Matter devices, the standard ratified barely two years ago, to just work (grins: they still often don’t) when you plug them in, and frantically recoding yaml code or contemplating custom firmware to shoehorn them into your IPv6 network. Um, should be routine, but currently ain’t. We are at the forefront of not cutting, but bleeding technology here at NabuCasa towers, pioneers, often wrangling yaml to screen scrape primitive web pages off the cloud, or reverse engineer hardware and protocols from vendors too lazy or illiterate to do their part, their marketing department dictating their customers use the cloud so they can lock in ongoing advertising revenue.
It has only taken a few months for searching using AI tools to become ubiquitous. Your predictive texts to fix spelling miztakes, the LLMs to write your homework essays and court pleadings, often hallucinating, the quick vibe using AI to get something over the line, stretching your boundaries and comfort zone, fingers crossed you won’t be caught or exposed fudging it, or overlooked something your digital companion hasn’t been taught yet The shine of soaring AI industry share prices riding the boom/bust cycle, ramping down sharply in the last week, the aftermath of one roguely attacking another (both military, fuel, as well as AI competitors) shaking our hopes. Maybe the AI boom is actually over - the Zenith reached - hindsight will tell. What remains after the next big thing rears it’s ugly head, everybody rushing in to ride the new wave, leaving the incumbents to pick up the pieces, consolidate and get out while the going is still good, or gobble up those that remain, stripping out the good bits and throwing away the rest into posterity?
Sighs, yes routine. We push the frontiers, it becomes boring, reliable, part of our normal day, early adopters and pioneers reminiscing like me here, building on the shoulders of giants, jaded, satisfied, enthusiastic, wiling to adapt but wary to venture where no man has gone before, lazily waiting for others to make the mistakes first, sometimes warning the freshly-minted tender naive ones based on sometimes bitter experience and sometimes surprising prescience gently and wisely ushering them into stumbling into a wunderland you know awaits them, and wondering what comes next, confident the human race will survive, adapt, replicate, and there will never be a dull boring moment!
Ecclesiastes 1:9
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I really enjoyed reading this.Thank you for sharing so many wonderful memories.
What struck me most wasn’t any particular technology you mentioned, but the pattern that connects them all.
Every generation believes it’s living through something unprecedented. Then, years later, what once felt revolutionary quietly becomes part of everyday life.
Maybe that’s the real destiny of good technology—not to stay exciting forever, but to become so ordinary that we stop noticing it.
I think that’s why I ended my article by saying that technology is at its best when it disappears. Not because it becomes invisible, but because it no longer stands between us and the world.
Again Thanks a lot. Reading them felt like walking through several decades of computing history.
Perhaps today’s pioneers become tomorrow’s nostalgia. Every generation has its own AltaVista moment.
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My grandma still had a shared line on the farm (apparently known as a party line) where you HD a coded ringtone and had to ask whether the line was clear before ringing the exchange to get connected (i.e. to make call).
I have friends that cannot read a map — a necessary skill where you don’t have GPS. I think many people don’t know how to read road signs for directions either anymore (understanding route naming and numbers, exits and exchanges). Anyway, back to maps: route planning is a lot easier for me with a nice large paper map.
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Of course. Knowing your route in advance helps a lot; Google, for example, has a tendency to “maliciously” change your route just when you’re not looking at your phone 
Recently, “sponsored routes” have also appeared, which can take you to a completely different destination.
I haven’t seen this, and a quick search doesn’t result in any published information about this. I’ve come to trust the Google Maps directions, since whenever I doubt them they turn out to be better than what I would have done, often because “my” way had more traffic, or construction, or whatever. It’s even found some pretty good alternate routes I never would have found, when there’s a big backup ahead.
I do find all their sponsored locations a bit annoying. Yeah, I get it, some company paid to show up on the map even though I indicated no interest in going there. Fine, but these are getting to be more numerous, and more intrusive.
I love stories like this because they bring back memories of my own.
When I was a child, my father made long-distance calls in a very similar way. He would first speak to the telephone exchange operator, tell them which city and which person he wanted to call, then hang up and go back to whatever he was doing. Before leaving, he’d tell us kids, “If the phone rings, come and get me. It means they’ve connected the call.”
At the time it all felt completely normal. Looking back now, it almost feels like another world.
Your story about paper maps made me smile too. In the 1990s, before GPS was common, whenever we drove to a city we didn’t know, one of the first things we’d do was stop at a small shop and buy a paper map of the city. That was just part of traveling.
Technology has moved so quickly that sometimes these memories feel like they belong to another lifetime. Maybe that’s why I enjoy hearing stories like yours. They remind us not only how much technology has changed, but also how quickly yesterday’s everyday life becomes history.
Ditto. My dad would plan our road trips in such detail from maps. This was very necessary back in the day, because you also couldn’t just fill the tank anywhere and at any time.