Claude figured out how to control my dishwasher

January 11, 2026 · 2 min read

I saw Karpathy's post about using Claude for home automation command center and wanted to try the same idea.

Karpathy Post

My target was my new Bosch Series 4 dishwasher that uses Home Connect. The result: hc-dishwasher-tui.

hc-dishwasher demo

Why a Terminal UI

I like keyboard-first TUIs, and I already knew toad uses Textual + Rich for their slick terminal UI. So I told Claude to use Textual, and it didn't disappoint. See other screenshots.

Ralph Wiggum-ing it

This was also a trial run for the /ralph-loop claude plugin inside a sandboxed VM. I let Claude take the wheel and iterate end-to-end, but it needed two passes:

Pass 1: Claude realized it needed Home Connect API keys, explained how to get them, and told me exactly how to provide them safely.
Pass 2: With keys in place, it built everything and wired up the API calls.

Polishing

I had to do a few chores still with Claude after the functional TUI was created:

Clearer Readme/install instructions.
Added screenshots.
A script to generate sample data.
Added rate limiting for Home Connect API.
A more detailed Logs widget.

End result: a clean little terminal app that can control, check status and start/stop the dishwasher without me opening a phone app.

Also hc-dishwasher-tui is fully reusable, I reviewed most of the code out of curiosity, ran security checks and I tested it on another dishwasher too.