Smart Home 2026: GitHub History, a 3D Model, and a Claude Brain

About this episode

Your smart home forgets everything. Jesse fixed that.

Jesse spent a few Saturday evenings turning his house into data. A consumer drone for the property shape, phone photos from the back of the yard, and his county property tax card. He handed all of it to Claude and got back a 3D model of his home he can spin around in a browser, ask questions of, and plan real construction against. He calls it property intelligence. Nick calls it GitHub revision history for your home.

The bigger idea is the part that stuck with us. Your house already is a system. Outlets, breakers, valves, square footage, property lines, warranties, and every quote a contractor ever handed you. Right now all of that lives in your head, in a drawer, or in Sharpie marks on a breaker box left by the previous owner. Cameras and a smart thermostat do not fix that, because none of it remembers anything. Give the house one place to keep its own state and history, and the light bulbs stop being the point.

Topics Covered

• What property intelligence means, and why "GitHub revision history for your home" is the right analogy
• The three inputs behind the model: drone shots, elevation photos from a phone, and the county property tax card
• Sculpting a 3D house in the browser without writing any 3D code yourself
• Treating a home as state: a parameterized data object with a full revision history
• Breaker boxes, Sharpie hieroglyphics, and why nobody trusts their own labeling
• Having Claude design the survey, including every measurement a pool project needs
• Reading a line item contractor quote you do not understand, and getting cost per square foot out of it
• A house that never forgets what you were quoted
• Which tree hits which room if it falls, worked out with trigonometry
• Why smart homes still feel dumb, where Home Assistant fits, and verified history as a badge on a listing

What you'll learn

• How to start documenting a property with tools you probably already own
• Why starting low resolution is right, and how you sculpt accuracy in over time
• How to ask an agent to design the data model before you collect any data
• Where the real work in a system like this actually is, and why it is not the code
• How to point the same pattern at a rental, an office complex, or a bed and breakfast

Links & Resources

• Claude
• Home Assistant
• Matter, the smart home standard Jesse mentions
• DJI consumer drones
• Photogrammetry, the field Jesse has not gone down yet
• Metcalfe's law, the network value idea Jesse reaches for
• Zillow, where Jesse thinks the verified history badge belongs
• Your property tax card lives with your county assessor. Search your county name plus "property tax card" and it is usually public.
• Everything else we make

This episode is sponsored by NonFiction Agency: https://nonfiction.agency

We're Nick and Jesse, two brothers building a marketing agency with AI agents doing a real share of the work. Not Replaced Yet is where we show what we actually use, what broke, and what we would do differently. We trade the interview chair every episode.