My HomeAssistant instance is running on a Raspberry Pi but every once in a while the device stops working. I have to manually restart the device by cycling the power. This introduced another problem, as the file system corrupts sometimes when this happens. I have to painstakingly re-install Home Assistant. Can Henk (my OpenClaw bot) fix these problems by promoting him to my Home Assistant admin?
The first struggle i had to overcome was making sure my Mac Mini could connect to Home Assistant Raspberry Pi via its own SSH key. After getting it up and running I asked Henk to start checking the health status of the Home Assistant instance. It came back with a couple of things that needed fixing, but there were no alerts, predictions or recovery guarantees. So a healthy system does not mean it will never go down.
When my Home Assistant system was timing out again today, I feared the system was corrupted again. I felt annoyed by this realization. At this point I lost all trust in the system and was ready to start treating Home Assistant as something that needed to have production infrastructure.
So I outsourced my engineering to ChatGPT, to have a plan on what I could have Henk do to make this more into a system that repairs itself when possible. It helped me to stop guessing what I should do to have a robust system.
So when I asked Henk to start implementing this, it started to add automatic recovery, data backups and a reduced dependency on me. All to make me feel more at ease, and to move this from an often flaky system to a system that reboots before freezing and does not need manual intervention.
So I accidentally built an SRE (Site Reliability Engineer) team of one.
Key insight: I confused silence with stability.
When my Home Assistant system was silent I assumed everything was running smoothly. This gave me a false sense of security. When I kept ignoring my slowly rising resting heart rate because I told myself it’s temporary and not fixing my training workload I was also prioritizing comfort over a correction.