Karpathy: Most Apps Shouldn't Exist, 3 Word Prompt to Let AI Take Over Entire Smart Home

According to 1M AI News's monitoring, Andrej Karpathy stated in the No Priors podcast that most smart home apps in the app store "should not exist at all; everything should be an API endpoint, and the agent should be the intelligent glue layer." He shared a home agent built in January this year named "Dobby the elf claw": with just three hints, the agent autonomously scanned the local network, discovered Sonos speakers, reverse-engineered their protocol, and took over playback control. Today, Dobby unifiedly controls lights, air conditioning, curtains, the pool, and the security system through a WhatsApp chat, replacing six previous standalone apps. He also integrated a visual model to monitor security cameras, automatically sending image messages to WhatsApp when someone visits.

"This should be free within a year or two, without any vibe coding; this is basic competence," Karpathy said. "The customer is no longer a human but an agent acting on behalf of humans. The scale of this refactoring will be quite substantial."