My Apartment Now Dims the Lights on Guests (On Purpose🙈)

In my previous blog, I built a remote MCP server connected to Claude so I could control my smart light bulb by just sending a chat message . It worked! But looking back, the architecture was a glorious overkill. All of this, for two people who just want to dim the lights in the evening 🫠.. Around the same time, I had been hearing a lot about the trend of “Skills over MCP” and the hype around OpenClaw. OpenClaw is popular because it’s a local-first AI assistant — the whole orchestration runs on your own devices, no cloud infrastructure needed, just enough flexibility to build something genuinely useful. That sounded like exactly the right learning opportunity. So I decided to build an OpenClaw-inspired personal assistant for smarthome control — simpler, local, and tailored to just what I needed. Spoiler⚠️ : it worked out well. My partner and I can now control the light bulb from Slack, and we can schedule light adjustments via chat. I am obsessed with healthy lifestyle. So naturally, I