brAIn

What it is

A Home Assistant add-on that runs Claude Code and a suite of tools inside HA, which builds a permanent memory of your house.

It sees the whole system — every entity, device, area, floor, dashboard, helper and automation — and it can change any of it. Explain a broken automation. Fix it. Write a new one. Remember why, next time.

That memory isn’t a black box. Open it, read it, edit it, correct it. An insights panel shows what it knows about your house and what it’s done there — in the sidebar, or embedded straight into your dashboards.

Reach it however you want: as your conversation agent, through a full-featured chat interface, or from native Claude Code. Your automations can call it too — which means your house can ask for help before you notice anything’s wrong.

One install, one sidebar panel, one login. Runs on the Claude Pro or Max subscription — or your own API key.

It runs Home Assistant

Not just “turn on a light” — 69 admin services reach the parts of HA that normally live behind the Settings UI, plus 89 native tools and a real shell in /config. What it can reach →

It finds what's broken

A dying battery, a sensor that stopped reporting three weeks ago, an automation whose trigger can never fire. Press Fix it and it shows exactly what it would change; press Apply and it does — with an Undo on the card. Findings →

It remembers your house

One plain-markdown document of durable facts — nicknames, rhythms, the devices that are meant to behave oddly. Everything brAIn does reads it, and brain memory export carries it to new hardware — no starting over. Memory →

It explains your house

Ask anything and get a card: the answer, the numbers and a chart. Refine it in a sentence, Share it as a picture or onto a dashboard. Insights →

It tells you about a leak, whatever else is going on

A tripped leak, smoke, CO or gas sensor is a critical card and a phone alert the moment it trips — through quiet hours, with reminders, without waiting for any AI, a sign-in or a usage budget. Permissions & Safety →

It keeps the house in order

Tidy names and rooms as one table you approve and can undo, an answer to “should I update tonight?” that quotes its evidence, an overnight check that names the cause, and a house book you can share. Upkeep →

It runs your devices and your other add-ons

Edit, validate and flash ESPHome devices, clear out stale Music Assistant speakers, and drive BRUH Minecraft, BRUH Print and BRight — “put Steve in creative”, “print a label that says chili” — all by asking. ESPHome → · Music Assistant →

It talks, in a voice you choose

Pick brAIn in Settings → Voice assistants. Give it a personality, or run several agents with different names — and each chooses its own reach, from only what you expose to Assist up to everything. Voice →

It has a terminal

The real Claude Code CLI with your /config in front of it, as a chat or as a true terminal — one button between them. Several conversations stay open at once and switching stops nothing, so one left mid-answer is finished when you come back. Permission asks arrive as cards in the chat — or turn on Let brAIn act without asking and it stops asking — and it never asks you to chown a file. Terminal →

It works from automations

brain.run_task for background jobs, scheduled insight reports rendered to sensors, and events your automations can trigger on. Automations →

It can be undone

Every file brAIn writes to is snapshotted first — the automation an accepted proposal adds included. brain undo lists the edits in plain English and puts one back. The CLI →

It administers your setup

Most AI integrations can turn on a light. brAIn runs the installation. It reaches Home Assistant three ways at once — native tools for reading and controlling, admin services for the registry, and a shell for everything that is still a YAML file.

• Organisation — create, rename and delete areas, floors and labels; set icons and voice aliases; move devices and entities between them. “Put every upstairs room on a floor called Upstairs and rename the Shellys to what they actually control.”
• Devices and entities — rename either, change an entity_id, hide, unhide, enable, disable. Find references to things that no longer exist and clean them up — dry-run first, so you see the list before anything goes.
• What a device shows as — a contact sensor as a door, a cover as a garage door, a smart plug running a fan or a lamp as a fan or a light, a sensor in °F with one decimal. Show as →
• Dashboards — read, create, rewrite, restore a previous version. It can build a dashboard from a sentence.
• Automations, scripts and scenes — it edits the YAML, validates it, reloads the domain, then reads the traces to see whether the thing actually fired and why it didn’t. That last part is what makes “write me an automation” work on the second try instead of never.
• The house’s own record — history and long-term statistics, the logbook, the error log, your other add-ons, weather, camera snapshots it can actually see, and every service any integration exposes.

Nothing is create-only. Everything that can be created can be renamed and deleted, and every attribute a create_ service accepts has a service that changes it later.

It fixes what it finds

A finding is something wrong with your house, filed by brAIn on its own while it was looking at something else. Each one carries the evidence — the entity, the number, the day it started — and what would resolve it.

Every card takes the same row of answers: Fix it (where software can — brAIn shows you exactly what it will change and changes nothing until you press Apply, and the card keeps an Undo afterwards), Add to list, Dismiss for “not now”, and Not a problem for “you’ve got this wrong” — with a box for why, which is the half that teaches. “That sensor always reads on, it’s not stuck” becomes a standing fact about your house, so the next run doesn’t make the same mistake in new words.

Findings reach you without the panel open too: in Home Assistant’s Repairs, as the todo.brain_system_brain to-do list, as sensor.brain_findings_open_findings, and — with one option set (findings_notify_service) — as phone notifications with the same answer buttons and a Reply.

It writes what you ask for, in a sentence

Some of the things on the Proposals tab start with you rather than with a pattern it found:

• A rule in a sentence — “whenever the front door opens after dark, turn the hall light on”. brAIn drafts the automation, replays it over the last month, grades it against what you actually did, and offers it with the case in one line — would have fired 9 times; you’d already done the same yourself on 4. Try it for a week first if you like.
• One-offs — “turn the porch light off when the guests leave”. An ordinary automation that runs once and switches itself off, left in your automations saying it fired until you press Remove.
• Four scenes for a room — morning, day, evening and night, composed from what each bulb in that room can actually be told, shown as swatches before you say yes. Accept them and brAIn offers the schedule that moves between them, using the times it has measured for when your house gets up and settles.

It tells you about a leak, whatever else is going on

A tripped leak, smoke, carbon monoxide or gas sensor is filed as a critical card naming the sensor and the time, and sent to your phone straight away — through quiet hours, with reminders behind it — without waiting for any AI to look at it, and without needing a Claude sign-in, the automatic switch or any usage budget. With no notification service set, it lands in Home Assistant’s own notifications. Every trip is its own alert. Permissions & Safety →

It acts, twice, and only because you said so

Everything above reports or proposes. Two things change the house, and both are decisions you make once, in advance:

• Emergency playbooks — the automation you would want on a bad night: smoke or CO, a water leak, a freeze with the heating stopped. brAIn writes it from your own registries, lists every entity it would touch on the card, and Home Assistant runs it, not brAIn — only once you have accepted it. Rehearse it to see what it would do, against the house right now, changing nothing. No playbook ever unlocks a door or disarms an alarm.
• Overnight self-healing — off by default. Switched on, it does three dull things while you are asleep and nothing else: starts an add-on that was set to run at boot, pings a dead Z-Wave node, reloads an integration that failed to set up. Once a night, inside your quiet hours, three at most, never on a protected entity, and no Claude run anywhere on that path. The morning brief says what it did and whether it stuck.

It learns, and everything reads what it learned

Memory is one markdown document you can open and edit. brAIn writes to it from conversations, insight runs and background study sessions — and voice, insights and the terminal all read it. Tell the voice assistant something and the cards know it.

When brAIn believes something it can’t confirm, it says so as a guess you answer with one tap — “The garage fridge is meant to run 24/7 — right?” Three open at a time, never more. Guesses sit at the top of the Findings tab, because “is this broken?” and “have I got this right?” are the same job — a question only you can answer — and one list should hold everything waiting on you. Yes files it as a fact; No records a dead end that is never revisited.

It works from the sofa

The panel is one ingress page with four tabs — Home, Ask, House and Help — built for a phone as seriously as a desktop: every target is at least 44px, cards rearrange themselves for a narrow screen, and the terminal folds the chrome away when the keyboard comes up.

Built for Home Assistant

What makes this different from running Claude Code on a regular machine:

• Your Claude subscription covers it — OAuth sign-in, so Pro/Max includes your usage; an API key works too. One login covers the panel, the terminal, voice, insights and memory.
• 89 purpose-built MCP tools — live states, device control, cameras, history and statistics, registries, dashboards, live automation traces, templates, logs, reloads, what a device shows as, what brAIn has measured about your house, ESPHome, Music Assistant, BRUH Minecraft, BRUH Print and BRight.
• Auto-generated context — every boot regenerates /config/CLAUDE.md, a snapshot of your install that Claude reads at the start of each session.
• Usage-limit sensors — the same session and weekly utilisation as claude.ai, as HA sensors with reset times, plus a budget that pauses scheduled work before it eats your week. Manual presses are never blocked.
• Safe by default — a voice agent reaches only what you expose to Assist unless you widen it, and new agents start with the administration services blocked; the terminal and the chat ask before acting unless you say otherwise, behind an action gate that decides from your own words; protected entities hold on every face; a non-root sandbox behind an AppArmor profile (6/6 on the add-on store’s security rating); the terminal port ships unpublished and password-protected; backup_exclude keeps the Claude credential out of HA backups; secrets.yaml is never snapshotted and never edited.
• Two CLI commands, not fourteen — brain for its own faculties, ha for Home Assistant chores. The CLI.
• It can be checked, on your house — brain doctor is free and answers whether the plumbing is connected; --deep walks every face of the add-on with one real round trip each, and --rehearse plants a couple of defects here, scores the checks and the analyst against them, and takes everything back out. Neither ever runs on a timer.

What it doesn’t do

brAIn can’t add an integration (config flows are interactive, so it walks you to the right screen and you click — removing one it can do), never touches credentials, and doesn’t back up your configuration — Home Assistant’s own backups already do that. What it keeps is an edit journal of the files it touched — the automation an accepted proposal writes included — so brain undo can put one back. The full scorecard: what brAIn can and can’t reach.

Back up Home Assistant first — somewhere that isn’t this machine

brAIn edits your real configuration: automations, dashboards, helpers, entities. It is built to be careful, it snapshots files before it changes them, and brain undo puts them back — but none of that is a backup you can restore from if something goes wrong. Settings → System → Backups, then copy it off the device: a backup that only exists on the machine you are changing is the one you cannot use when that machine is the problem.

Quick Start → — add the repo, install (a prebuilt-image pull, not a local build — a download, not minutes of compiling), restart HA once, sign in, press Start learning. About five minutes, plus a few minutes of study in the background.