Why I want to build fewer settings menus
A change is often easier to describe than to make through several menus.
A small change can take a surprising number of clicks. Consider a heating schedule: I want slightly warmer evenings. I have to open several days, find the right time slots and change the same temperature repeatedly.
Yet the request fits into one sentence: “In the weekly schedule, change every 19.5°C entry between 6 and 10 pm to 20°C.”
I want to build more software that understands requests like this. An LLM translates the request into a fixed format. The application checks the values and permissions, then shows which entries would change. Nothing is saved until I confirm. If something is unclear, it asks.
The model has no tools and executes nothing itself. It produces a proposal; the application uses its own rules to decide whether that proposal is allowed.
My Home Assistant setup made me think about this gap: the change is easy to describe, but there is no suitable interface for making it.
A slider still makes sense for a single value. Language becomes interesting when one intention is scattered across many fields and menus. Those are the settings pages I’d like to build less often.