Ambience v1.1.0 - Now with an MCP server and a default HACS integration
Some of you may remember my post a few weeks ago when I released Ambience v1.0.0.
Ambience is a condition-based scene engine for Home Assistant. You describe scenes for a room (e.g. "Room is empty", "Movie time") along with the conditions under which each scene should apply ("Projector is turned on", "Person in room", "Daytime", "Cloudy weather"). Ambience watches your home and applies the best-matching scene automatically.
It dramatically reduces the complexity required to build a sophisticated automation by listing each scene in order, and having the first matching scene win:
MCP Setup
With v1.1.0, I've added an AI interface that can be used either with copy and paste with any AI agent, or live via a local stdio MCP server that works with Claude. (Later I'll add support for ChatGPT and others.)
It's very easy to set up with Claude. First generate a long lived access token in HA, then use the following command in your terminal:
claude mcp add ambience --scope user \
--env AMBIENCE_HA_URL=http://homeassistant.local:8123 \
--env AMBIENCE_HA_TOKEN=YOUR_TOKEN \
-- uvx ambience-mcp@latest
... then restart Claude.
Using the MCP server
You can just say "With Ambience, ..." followed by the info you want or the scenes you would like Claude to build.
I deleted my existing Kitchen island lights setup and gave the following prompt to Claude:
With Ambience, in the kitchen, make the island lights turn on to 25% when somebody arrives at the island. after 15 seconds, turn the lights up to 40% because their continued presence indicates that the person wants to prepare something and needs more light. Turn the lights down again once the island has been vacant for a minute, and off completely after a total of 5 minutes. but if the projector is on (the cine remote current activity is ps5 projector or nvidia shield projector) then turn the lights off completely after just 1 minute. all light transitions should fade over 3s.
This is a trickier scenario than it initially appears: you want the lights to come on initially at 25% but then to increase to 40% once the person has been there for 15 seconds, but if the presence sensor loses the user for 1 second, you don't want the lights to go back to 25% immediately (or when the user returns to the island).
Initially, Claude didn't spot this issue, but once I pointed it out, it added a valid fix:
| Rank | Scene | Wins when |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Island vacant + projector — off | vacant ≥1 min and PS5/Nvidia on projector |
| 2 | Island settled in — 40% | occupied ≥15s |
| 3 | Island arrival — 25% | occupied and both island lights currently off |
| 4 | Island vacant 5 min — off | vacant ≥5 min |
| 5 | Island vacant 1 min — 25% | vacant ≥1 min |
It showed me this preview of what it planned to implement. Once I approved, it added the rules to my Ambience configuration:
Ambience has undo/redo buttons, so it is easy to remove any changes that Claude makes.
I built the training documents that Claude downloads from HA using my existing scenarios. I then deleted my existing setup before testing out this scenario with different prompts. What is interesting is that, each time I ran it, Claude gave me a different but equally valid solution to the problem, and all of them were shorter than my own solution.
If you don't provide enough info in the initial prompt, you may have to have some back and forth discussion before you end up with a valid setup, but Claude understands how Ambience works well enough to give you what you ask for.
I'd love to hear feedback from others about how well this works for them.
Posted Aug 5, 2026, 1:31 PM UTC