Teaching an AI Agent to Talk to a Light Bulb (and Why I Had to Get Up From My Desk) I just shipped a PR that made a pile of stock-firmware Sengled W12-N15 bulbs reliably re-bind to a self-hosted MQTT broker for Home Assistant with no firmware flashing, no soldering, no physical mods. The fix itself is small (one file, ~120 lines of Python in SengledTools ). The interesting part is how it got debugged: a back-and-forth between a coding agent and a human who kept having to leave the chair to walk over and power-cycle a light bulb. This post is part technical write-up, part field notes on what it's actually like to pair-program with an AI on hardware that doesn't live inside the computer. The technical problem in one paragraph Sengled's W15-N15 series ESP8266-based bulbs run the AWS IoT C SDK on top of mbedtls. After Sengled's cloud went dark, the community-maintained SengledTools project stood up a local MQTT broker (amqtt) and HTTP endpoint server so the bulb thinks it's still talking to the mothership.…