LG announced on Monday that you can stop writing automation rules and simply tell the…
LG announced on Monday that you can stop writing automation rules and simply tell the house what you want.
My first reaction was that I have never written one.
Ahead of IFA Berlin on 31 August, LG unveiled ThinQ Claw, a text-chat agent sitting on top of the appliances. The pitch is one sentence long: no rules to write, just say you've got people coming at seven and it handles the oven, the air and the temperature, remembering what you like and what you don't. LG describes it as built on the concept of OpenClaw, the open-source personal agent.
For anyone who has built a smart home properly, that is the end of an era. They spent a decade assembling if-this-then-that: if it's half six, if somebody is home, if the door has been open more than thirty seconds. Every new situation meant another line. The list grew until nobody dared touch it.
I skipped that era completely.
Not out of skill, out of arriving late. By the time I started running an agent at home the agent era had already started, and from the first day to this one I have not written a single if / then / else. I say what I want: wake me at six forty-five, ten minutes earlier if it's raining. In the old world that was a rule, a condition and a helper. Now it is a sentence.
I say what I want: wake me at six forty-five, ten minutes earlier if it's raining.
I'm not claiming rules are dead. The rules are still there, what changed is who writes them. You used to have to anticipate every case in advance and commit it to a list. Now you describe the case and it assembles the list on the spot.
The caveats, which deserve saying: ThinQ Claw is a demonstration on LG's stand at IFA. No release date, no markets named. It is typed, not spoken. And it lives inside LG's own ecosystem, your kit has to speak ThinQ or Homey to be part of it. What I run at home is open-source and takes anything, at the cost of maintaining every part of it myself.
But the direction they are describing and the one I'm walking in are the same.
What I take from it is something else. A skill can go out of date before you ever get round to learning it. And whoever turns up late doesn't have to make up the decade.
