31 October 2026 · 3 min read
Why I built M-UI
Home automation is one of the most rewarding hobbies in tech — until you sit down to write your twentieth YAML automation. Then it becomes a syntax quiz where the answer keys live in three different forums.
The pain
I wanted a simple thing: turn on a fan when the bathroom gets humid. That meant: finding the right entity ID, remembering the difference between numeric_state and state triggers, looking up the service name for a switch, and discovering that my sensor reports humidity as a string, not a number. Forty minutes for four lines of YAML.
The idea
What if you could just pick the sensor and the fan from a visual canvas, connect them, and get working code? That’s M-UI. It’s a machine-user interface: you describe what the machine should do, and it writes the code.
What it does today
- Visual canvas — drag devices, connect triggers to actions
- Device library — Shelly, Aqara, Hue, Sonoff, Tasmota, LIFX
- Export — Home Assistant YAML and Node-RED JSON
- Shareable links and JSON import/export for version control
What’s next
More devices, more targets (ESPHome, Python), and a community device library so adding hardware is a pull request away. If you want to follow along, star the repo or subscribe to the newsletter.