Overview

Home Assistant is two things at once in this setup.

As a smart home platform: HA owns an entity state machine for the house — every light, sensor, lock, climate device, and presence tracker is an entity with state and attributes. When state changes, automations fire. We use this for lights, climate, music, presence detection, motion pipelines, and voice responses.

As a container orchestration platform: Home Assistant OS (HAOS) runs the Supervisor, which manages add-ons as isolated containers. We take full advantage of this:

• The SSH Terminal add-on is where we live — Claude Code sessions run here interactively, the second-brain worker SDK runs here, all the s6-supervised daemons (audiod, fused, described, vault-watcher, parlor-voice, engineering-notebook) are managed from here
• Mounted NAS storage (/media/storage1/) is accessible from the add-on, giving the entire intelligence layer visibility into projects, vaults, models, and outputs
• Docker containers (episodic-memory-indexer, classifyd, TeslaMate, and others) run alongside HA under docker-compose, also managed from within
• Port forwarding makes this stack externally reachable: the catalog serves on :3003, engineering notebook on :3333, parlor-voice on :8099, and Nabu Casa provides secure remote access via a cloud tunnel

The MQTT bridge (Mosquitto add-on, listed in sense) routes external device telemetry into HA entities and carries outbound trigger events to the pipeline. Worker prompts in the self domain query HA’s REST/WebSocket API directly to ground their outputs in current home state. We expect this API surface to be used more heavily as the AI integrations mature.

Domain boundaries

Sense-domain services (described, meanwhile) consume home events but live in sense — they are perceptual pipelines, not home-state services. TeslaMate lives in sense for the same reason. Mosquitto lives in sense where its custom MQTT topics are most visible.