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AI-assisted scenes

Beta

This feature is new and still evolving — the workflow and the knowledge pack may change between releases. Everything an AI produces is previewed and imported by you; nothing is written to Home Assistant automatically, and every import is reversible with undo.

Describe what you want in plain English to an AI (Claude, ChatGPT, …) and let it write the scenes — conditions and actions — for your real entities. Or hand it a diagnostic and ask "why didn't my scene fire?": it reads the trace, explains what blocked the scene, and gives you a corrected version.

The AI tab is hidden by default. Enable it in Settings → Devices & services → Ambience → Configure → Enable the AI authoring tab (beta), then open the Ambience panel and find it under Settings → the AI tab.

How it works — three steps

  1. Install the skill or plugin (see below) — once per AI. This teaches the AI the Ambience schema and how to read a diagnostic.
  2. Download your AI bundle. In the AI tab, click Download AI bundle. It's a snapshot of your areas, floors, entities, exposed actions and current config — so the AI references your real ids, not made-up ones. Give the file to the AI along with your request.
  3. Upload the result. The AI returns a small YAML (or JSON) file. Upload it in the AI tab — Ambience previews exactly what it will add, update or remove (and any new category it will create) before you confirm.

Can you do better than the AI?

This feature is only as good as the knowledge pack behind it — and you can help make it better. If the AI gives you bad advice, please open a GitHub issue with:

  • the AI's suggestion — the import block it produced,
  • your corrected version, and
  • a short note on what was wrong and why your version is better.

Real before/after examples like these are exactly what's used to improve the cookbook the AI learns from — so the next person (and the next you) gets better answers.

Installing the AI pack

The "AI pack" teaches the AI the Ambience schema and how to read a diagnostic. Install it in whichever form suits your AI. Always install the stable version — it matches the released integration; the main branch is unreleased development and may be incompatible.

Claude Code

Install the plugin (it bundles the skill and the /ambience-create / /ambience-fix commands):

/plugin marketplace add clintongormley/ambience@stable
/plugin install ambience@ambience

The @stable is important — it pins the pack to the latest release. To get new versions automatically, enable auto-update for the marketplace once: /plugin → Marketplaces → ambience → enable auto-update.

claude.ai

Upload the skill folder as a Claude Skill: ai/skill/ambience-author/ (from the stable branch). It contains the skill plus its reference docs.

Any other AI

Paste the single self-contained guide into your AI: ambience-ai-guide.md (from the stable branch).

Keep the pack in step with Ambience

Before authoring, the skill checks that the bundle's Ambience version matches the pack. If your installed Ambience is newer than the pack, it asks you to update the plugin first (so it isn't working from an out-of-date schema) — update with /plugin marketplace update ambience then re-install, or enable auto-update as above.

Privacy

The AI bundle is a local download — you choose when and to whom to send it. Presence and location data is redacted before it leaves Home Assistant: person and device-tracker locations, the zones in your traces, your weather/workday entities, and the rendered output of people/template conditions. Secrets in your actions are scrubbed too — alarm/lock codes, and the default values of sensitive fields such as a notification's message, recipients or push token.

Person ids and names do remain, so the AI can write presence conditions that reference the right people — a household member's name may therefore appear in the bundle — but their current location does not.

What it's good at

  • Building a scene group from a description — e.g. "in the evening, when it's dark in the living room and someone's home, dim the lights and close the blinds."
  • Diagnosing a scene that didn't fire — it reads the recent traces in your bundle, finds the condition that blocked it, and proposes a fix.

The AI never changes Home Assistant directly: it produces a file, you review the preview, and you import it.