For years, I had been looking for an app that would allow me to perform basic queries and automate my HomeKit accessories from the terminal or using cron. For example, checking at 10 PM whether I forgot to close the garage door and sending me a notification if I did.
For some tasks, I started using Shortcuts, but that has always been painful for me: the very unresponsive Shortcuts interface, no practical way to keep shortcuts in version control, no proper way to try and catch errors when an accessory is not responding, and many other small papercuts that Apple has not addressed in years.
Yesterday, I was once again chatting with ChatGPT about this and was about to ask it to create a plan for building such a tool. I was even ready to start paying Apple’s $100 developer account fee to get the HomeKit entitlement.
But in the middle of that heated conversation, ChatGPT asked me why I wanted to create something that had already been created: HomeClaw (GitHub, Mac App Store).
I looked over the description, and bingo. This is the app I had been looking for. It allows me to query and control my home the way I wanted. It even keeps an activity-change log for accessories, which I can quickly parse with my own scripts. Five minutes later, I had a short script that tells me the current status of my garage doors and when that status last changed.
This seems to be a fresh project, with its first release in February 2026, so give it a try. Not affiliated, just a happy user who found exactly what I was looking for (and a bug which was quickly addressed).