Reverse-engineering is cheap now

Coding agents are reviving an old workaround — reverse-engineering home devices to automate them — by solving an old problem: the economics. Simon Willison's Weblog notes that engineers have long had the technical ability to reverse-engineer undocumented smart home APIs, but the effort rarely made sense; undocumented interfaces are fragile and change without warning, trapping you in maintenance cycles. Agents flip that calculus: code is now cheap enough that people treat automation scripts as disposable, which removes the psychological burden of committing to long-term maintenance.

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