Kinetic for My House: What Building with Claude Taught Me About Intent

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Part of my day job at Cisco was once Kinetic for Cities: orchestrating sensors, networks and data at the scale of a city. A house-scale version of it was my quiet dream.

Illustrative smart-home dashboard mockup with camera feeds, thermostat, hourly energy chart and device tiles

Illustrative mockup built for this post 🙂

From a Pi to a platform

What started a year ago with a Raspberry Pi and a few sensors grew into a dedicated server, a plethora of sensors, smart displays, and a web of automations, workflows and API integrations holding it all together.

Somewhere along the way I started building with Claude, and the pace changed completely.

It stopped feeling like a tool

Work I'd scoped in months landed in hours. Edge cases I hadn't even reached yet came back already handled. It worked straight against the codebase, pushed changes out to the panels, re-ran the tests, and emulated the scenarios I couldn't easily stage myself.

It started feeling like a team: engineer, developer, tester, even an electrician on call at 1am when I finally had time to tinker.

Knowing what I wanted was the whole job

And it changed what the work actually is. The integrations weren't hard. The orchestration wasn't hard. Knowing exactly what I wanted was the whole job.

Who's reading now?

I still write on Reddit, Stack Overflow and here on CYBERtrendz. I just know now that the next reader probably isn't human.

That brings back a question raised in a recent IISc lecture on the AI shift: we spent centuries building an economy around human intellect. Now that intelligence is cheap, what value do we bring to the table?

For me, for now, the answer is intent, vision, and the willingness to build.

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