build log · the Stancs home lab
Projects Brad and Claude ship together — a health tracker, this blog, whatever we take on next — tracked one entry at a time.
There's a tablet on the wall that runs the house, and its dashboards had grown the way these things do — one card at a time until nothing fit. Rebuilding them properly meant designing for exactly one screen, giving the assistant a way to actually see that screen, and finding out that a 3D model of the house could lock the whole thing up.
shipped · home assistant + a fire tablet on the wall read the build →
For years I was the only person at home who could actually run the pool — heating it took two separate toggles, one of them buried three screens deep in an app. A firmware flash, an afternoon of watching the app's own traffic, and one small bridge service later, the whole thing lives on the wall tablet: pump, heater, heat pump, spa, targets and light colours, for anyone who walks past.
shipped · docker-prod-01 + home assistant read the build →
Home Assistant's Tesla integration had been dead since June, so the wall tablet knew nothing about either car. TeslaMate already had everything live over MQTT; one small relay later, both cars show up in Home Assistant with about thirty-five sensors each — and cards that pulse while driving, fill while charging, and turn red if one's left unlocked somewhere.
shipped · docker-prod-01 + home assistant read the build →
Grok lives in my car, and my Life Planner lives in a git repo in the house. I wanted one to be able to reach the other — so I built a small MCP server that gives Grok my mail, my calendar and a read-only view of the planner. Most of the work wasn't the tools. It was deciding exactly how much a voice assistant on the open internet should be allowed to touch.
shipped · docker-prod-01 read the build →
My laptop closes, sleeps and travels, and every Claude Code session on it dies with the lid. So a second MacBook now lives in the closet running an always-on Claude I can reach from my phone, kept identical to the laptop by a sync script — plus a small hook that names every workspace after what I'm actually doing in it.
shipped · a second macbook + herdr + remote control read the build →
I was paying a subscription for the privilege of exporting my own transactions as a CSV so Claude could read them. Replacing it took an afternoon — which is either the end of a whole category of software, or a bill that comes due later. No real numbers here; every figure below is made up.
in progress · fastapi + sqlite + plaid read the build →
I gave my assistant a scoped, read-and-write key to my UniFi network and asked it to take inventory. It came back with an uncomfortable answer: north of a hundred devices — cameras, smart-home gadgets, laptops, a pile of Apple gear — all living in the same room with no walls between them. So we started building walls.
in progress · unifi read the build →
My self-hosted Tesla logger had been quietly dead for three months, and a car I own had never been connected at all. Fixing that turned into an MCP server, so now I can ask — in plain English — where either car is, whether it's moving, and when it'll arrive. The interesting part wasn't the data. It was teaching it to admit when it doesn't know.
shipped · docker-prod-01 read the build →
A family member was hospitalised suddenly, and the thing that carried me through it wasn't a clever model — it was two years of accumulated context about my family that meant I never had to explain myself. Scans, wearable data, recordings, clinician profiles, travel and costs, all in one place and answerable in plain English. This is what a second brain is actually for.
shipped · local files + claude read the build →
I bought a cable machine that logs itself, then wondered whether cameras and audio could give the same treatment to a rack full of dumb steel. Two Wi-Fi security cameras, a conference microphone and a morning of debugging later, the garage has eyes and ears — and not one verified rep.
in progress · macbook + reolink nvr read the build →
We wired a brokerage API into the home lab, built a phone-installable PWA behind the tunnel, and taught Claude to stage trades it is never allowed to fire. The human gets one green button. The AI gets everything else.
shipped · docker-prod-01 read the build →
This site went from "let's build a blog" to live on its own subdomain in one sitting — because we first taught Claude the entire deploy pipeline as a reusable skill. New site, one sentence. Here's the machinery, and the bugs.
shipped · docker-prod-01 read the build →
We built a self-hosted health app that pulls in the scale, the watch, the ring, and the food log, re-derives my real maintenance calories every two weeks, and answers questions in plain English. It also fills my grocery cart. Here's what a day with it looks like.
shipped · docker-prod-01 read the build →
The same pattern as the health tracker, pointed at money: full context, weekly reviews, constant what-if modeling, and a partner that finds the dollars we were leaving on the table. No numbers here — but the system is the story.
shipped · local files + claude read the build →
The family's plans, research, and records had become the most important folder in the house — with no history and no backup story. So we stood up our own private GitHub-style server at home and moved our life into it. Three lessons came with it.
shipped · proxmox read the build →
We imported 459 films and 168 series of viewing history, split the system into watched / watchlist / preferences, and turned "recommend me something tonight" into a routine that almost never suggests something I've already seen. It got better when the easy answers ran out.
shipped · markdown, honestly read the build →
We bought a Skylight for the kitchen counter, loved the device, and couldn't stand the software — so we rooted it, wiped it, and rebuilt it as the family's morning command center: chores with sign-off, both calendars, the weather, what to wear, and where mom and dad will be today.
shipped · the home lab + the kitchen counter read the build →
Before MCP, with nothing but raw Home Assistant APIs and rules given in plain English, Claude stood guard over an empty house — doors, cameras, lights, one cat — while simultaneously playing travel concierge in the city, down to "the MoMA exhibit is half a block from you."
shipped · home assistant + raw APIs read the build →
Three power monitors, a map of how the panels feed each other, readings every five seconds, and a live animated diagram of the whole property. Down to the circuit, we know where every watt goes.
shipped · the home lab read the build →
Our daughter's first sleepaway camp looked like one decision. It became the best demonstration yet of what an assistant with real family context can do — including a 60-item packing cart we approved in minutes, with two insights nobody asked for.
shipped · context and a browser read the build →
A dedicated media host in the apartment runs our own streaming service — Jellyfin and Plex over one shared library, with automation that keeps the collection organized, named, and current, and Watchtower keeping the whole stack fresh.
shipped · docker-media-01 read the build →
The services the household actually depends on — DNS and the database — run twice, split across two buildings, with a primary on each side of the property line between "main house" and "apartment." Placement is architecture.
shipped · both buildings read the build →
The lab's services run on a team of machines that act as one — if a machine dies, its services just move to a survivor, and the lab's front door automatically follows. Plus the opinionated rule that makes it reliable: precious data never lives inside the machinery that moves things around.
shipped · swarm-mgr-{1,2,3} read the build →
Our home servers used to be hand-built and irreplaceable — if one died, rebuilding it meant remembering what I did months ago. Now the entire lab is written down as automation recipes, and any machine can be rebuilt from scratch by running them.
shipped · proxmox × 3 read the build →
Self-hosted TeslaMate logs every drive, charge and parked hour into our own database, and feeds the live state straight into Home Assistant.
shipped · docker-prod-01 read the build →