On a Scale of 1 to 10, I Give It An 11
I have been using Home Assistant OpenCode for the last three months, and I can say without hesitation that it has remarkably improved my HA life. If you asked me to rate Home Assistant OpenCode on a scale of 1 to 10, I would give it an 11. It is that good. My smart home finally feels smart, because my dashboards are meaningful and my automations actually work the way I want them to.
Prior to using OpenCode, I was struggling with YAML more than I want to admit. I would spend an hour trying to get an automation trigger right, fighting indentation errors, searching for entity IDs, and rebuilding Lovelace cards that never looked right. That is all gone now. I write zero YAML now. The free Big Pickle AI agent does it all for me.
What is Home Assistant OpenCode?
Home Assistant OpenCode is a custom integration by pranjal-joshi that connects OpenCode Zen directly into Home Assistant as a conversation agent. OpenCode Zen is a curated AI gateway that gives you access to over 75 models, including powerful free models like MiniMax, Kimi, GLM, DeepSeek, and my personal favorite, Big Pickle.
Once connected, Home Assistant OpenCode lives inside Assist, your voice pipeline, and Developer Tools. It knows all your devices, areas, entities, and existing automations. You can talk to it in plain English, attach a screenshot or PDF, and it will build, fix, and explain things for you. It also adds an AI Tasks service called ai_task.generate_data that can generate structured summaries and data on demand.
Why the FREE Big Pickle AI Agent Changed Everything
Zen gives you free API access to several models, but Big Pickle is special. It is fast, it is incredibly accurate with Home Assistant context, and it costs nothing to use. This is the agent I use for all of my requests.
Before Big Pickle, my process was painful. I wanted a goodnight routine that turned off all downstairs lights, locked the front door, and set the thermostat to sleep mode. That should take 30 seconds. It took me over an hour of copying YAML examples and debugging conditions.
Now I just say, create an automation that turns off all downstairs lights, locks the front door, and sets the thermostat to 68 when I say goodnight. Big Pickle builds the full automation with the correct triggers, conditions, and actions. No YAML typing, no entity ID hunting.
How It Built Custom Dashboards Based on My Needs
This is the part I did not expect. Home Assistant OpenCode did not just help with automations, it rebuilt how I interact with my home.
I told it, my current dashboard is a mess. I want a simple dashboard for my kitchen tablet that shows only the living room, kitchen, and porch lights, the front door lock, and the current temperature for each area. It generated the Lovelace YAML for me. It even suggested using mushroom cards for a cleaner look.
Then I asked for a second dashboard for my office that focuses on energy. It pulled my power sensors, my office temperature, and my PC power monitoring plug and created a compact energy view that I actually use every day. These are meaningful, customized dashboards based on how I live, not generic grids of entities I will never tap.
Note: OpenCode works WITH me. I tell it what I want (or think I want). It first responds with suggestions or just lists what changes are to be made to what. It’s a back and forth between me and Big Pickle. In other words it’s like I’m having a conversation with an experienced programmer. We develop a plan; she executes, then I review the results before it gets deployed. Big Pickle does NOT just run amuck, alone, inside my Home Assistant!
Advanced Automations With Zero YAML
Here are real examples from my house in the last month that Big Pickle handled with no YAML from me:
- Context-aware lighting: I said, turn on the porch and driveway lights at sunset, but only if someone is home. It created an automation with a sun trigger and a zone condition for home occupancy.
- One sentence cozy scene: I said, make my living room cozy at 7pm, dim the lights to 40 percent, turn on the TV backlight, and set the thermostat to 72. It used to be three separate automations. Now it is one.
- Fix my broken logic: I pasted a failing automation and said, why did this not trigger last night? It found that I had left a condition from months ago that blocked it when my guest mode was on. It fixed it and explained it in plain English.
The best part is I can talk to it through my voice assistant. I use Developer Tools and Assist as my test bench, but I also set OpenCode as my default conversation agent under Settings and Voice Assistants. I can ask, what lights are on right now or why is my office so hot and get a real answer that checks sensors and automations.
How to Install OpenCode in Home Assistant in 5 Minutes
This is the exact method I used. You need HACS installed first.
Step 1: Install the Integration via HACS
- Open Home Assistant and go to HACS, then Integrations
- Click the three dots in the top right and select Custom repositories
- Add https://github.com/pranjal-joshi/opencode as category Integration
- Find OpenCode in the list, click Install, then Restart Home Assistant
Step 2: Get Your Free Zen API Key
- Go to opencode.ai/auth and sign in
- Copy your free API key. You can start with zero balance because the free models like Big Pickle are free per token
Step 3: Connect OpenCode to Home Assistant
- In Home Assistant, go to Settings, Devices and Services, Add Integration, then OpenCode
- Paste your API key
- Click Add conversation agent and choose your model. I recommend starting with big-pickle-free for speed and minimax-m2.5-free for complex automation building
- Optional but powerful: Click Add AI Task to enable the ai_task.generate_data service for daily summaries and structured data
Step 4: Start Talking to Your House
- Go to Developer Tools, Assist, and set your default agent to OpenCode
- Go to Settings, Voice Assistants, and set your conversation agent to OpenCode
- Test it with, what lights are on right now or create an automation when the last person leaves, turn off all lights and set thermostat to eco
Final Thoughts After 3 Months
I installed Home Assistant OpenCode because I was tired of spending my nights debugging YAML. I kept it because it made Home Assistant fun again. My dashboards finally make sense, my automations are more advanced than ever, and I have not typed a single line of YAML in three months.
If you have been putting off that perfect automation because you did not want to deal with the syntax, install Home Assistant OpenCode and try Big Pickle. It is free, it takes five minutes to set up, and it will save you hours every week. For me, it turned a frustrating chore into a simple conversation.
What is the first automation you would create if you could just say it out loud? Be creative!
Get started with Home Assistant here.
