Reverse engineering has become cheap
With the development of code agents, the cost of reverse engineering and home device automation has dropped sharply. Now even if documentation is missing and APIs are unstable, the cost of trying is minimal, and there is no need to worry about support or rewriting code.
Simon Willison notes that with the advent of coding agents, reverse engineering home devices has become much more accessible. Previously, the main barrier was the cost-benefit ratio — weeks of work and the risk that an undocumented API would break, requiring constant maintenance. Now, agents allow quickly achieving working automation at a low cost, and failure comes cheap. Maintaining or completely rewriting the code no longer seems burdensome because the initial investment is minimal.
Source: Simon Willison —
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