Reverse-engineering is cheap now

Coding agents have dramatically lowered the cost and effort required to reverse-engineer and automate home devices, making projects that were previously economically unfeasible now viable. Because AI-generated code is cheap to produce and maintain, developers no longer face the same psychological burden of committing to long-term maintenance or dealing with unstable APIs that might break in the future. This shift changes the cost-benefit calculation for automation projects that would have been dismissed as not worth the effort in the pre-agent era.