I Let AI Build a Sleep Noise Tracker to Find What Was Waking Me Up

The Problem

Living in a noisy city, the author kept waking up at 3am with no idea what caused it. A smartwatch confirmed the disruption but couldn't explain it. Without knowing the cause - a sound, a light, a temperature spike - any fix would just be guessing.

The Existing Setup

Home Assistant was already running with motion, door, temperature, humidity, and CO2 sensors throughout the flat. The missing pieces were audio capture and a pipeline to correlate sleep disturbance timestamps with sensor events.

What Was Built

Two cheap USB microphones (one inside, one outside) were added. Sleep data from a smartwatch was pulled in and matched to sensor events by timestamp. AI-generated code handled the audio level analysis, correlation logic, and visualization.

The Bigger Point

The author frames this not as a technical showcase but as a shift in what projects feel worth attempting. AI coding tools lower the effort threshold for personal infrastructure projects. Ideas that used to cost a week of evenings now fit into a weekend. The HN thread turned into a broader discussion about how AI tooling is expanding the scope of what individual developers build for themselves.