Reverse-engineering is cheap now

The cost of maintaining a homemade automation can matter as much as building it. Simon Willison argues that coding agents change both sides of that calculation: they reduce the effort of getting a simple automation working and make later repairs or rewrites less daunting. The example is home devices controlled through undocumented interfaces, which may change without warning. The July 20 essay draws on anecdotes rather than measured savings. The useful insight is that a project can become worth attempting when failure and future maintenance demand less personal effort, even though the underlying interface remains unstable.