> What it can’t tell me is whether I’ve actually done anything about it.

I have an elaborate Home Assistant setup with tons of zigbee sensors here and there telling me if front door is not closed properly, if the rice cooker is left on, if the garage door is left open, if window is left open. I have to keep changing batteries and manage flaky Zigbee connections in the past.

More recently, I've found the absolute most reliable, ~zero-maintainence solution to be an LLM. Home Assistant already has an LLM plugin, you can wire it up to a local LLM if you want, and you can just feed it an image and ask "Is this window open or closed"

I even found it useful for "Did the cat vomit on the floor" and "Do any plants look like they need attention"

and for TFA's use case, if you already have a security camera facing front, you can just feed it that image and ask "Are the garbage bins out"

Enjoyed this, thank you for writing it up and posting

That’s all well and good until the truck driver operating the mechanical arm drops your bin into the truck. Spoiler alert: the bin will not be fished out, it is now garbage.

So those tags are going to have to be a little cheaper before I’ll use them. :-)