House Sensing

AI Generated Human Curated

Stub. This page records what is already decided and what runs today. It will be expanded into a full article. Nothing here is new doctrine: every statement points to the Decision Register or to The Sensory Arm.

What this scope is

House sensing is one of the two scopes of the Sensory Arm identified so far (D-02). In the body analogy it is the senses, the muscles and the voice: it perceives the house, acts on it, and speaks in it. Its counterpart is Human telemetry, the internal organs.

It belongs to the Sensory Arm because of the boundary it crosses, not because of what it observes (D-01). Presence, doors, motion, climate and devices cross inward as observations. A switched fan and a spoken sentence cross outward.

What runs today

One Home Assistant instance runs the house: presence radars, door sensors, lights, fans, the carport gate and the voice satellites. On top of it sits the pepa_sensory_arm integration, a ReAct loop with three tools: ha_query, ha_control and call_external_llm. The first two are reflexes. The third is the punt. The version history records how the stack got here.

Pepa’s conversation sees only the entities exposed to it. That limit is enforced in code; keeping the exposure switches where they should be is, for now, discipline. See Governance.

What is settled

• Reflexes only. The scope acts on its own through direct, requested house actions under explicit, declared and guardrailed rules, never beyond them (D-05).
• Alarms are delivered, not decided. Shower safety and similar signals begin here as observations. The scope can deliver an alarm; deciding that one is warranted is not its job (D-12).
• Health talk is punted. A health matter spoken in the house is not housework. The scope hands it on and only voices whatever reply comes back (D-11).
• Raw and declared. What it collects is kept as received, and what it receives must be declared (D-06).
• No cameras. Any cameras in the house belong to a security plane outside Pepa (D-13).
• Mobile devices are not here. A sensing device that moves on its own, such as a robot, is its own arm (D-03).

What is not decided yet

• Who owns alarm decisions (O-01).
• Whether the repository and these page names follow the rename of the integration’s code (O-05).
• Where the declarations required by D-06 live (O-06).
• The mandate behind reflexes — its scope, its expiry, and which house actions always need escalation. Listed as identified, not yet designed in Governance.

To be written

• The reflex catalog: what the scope may do, in which rooms, and what always escalates.
• The voice path from satellite to reply.
• How observations are delivered to the arms that consume them.
• Known misfires and how each reflex arc was rewired.