It is an interesting thought experiment: what things happen once the inertia cost to seeing how something works collapses to 0 for even a small number of your user base. Smart companies might give in now and open up their app even if only as a read-only repo. Dumb ones won’t even know to consider it. And the huge middle will wind up getting new UX ideas for free.

As a data point here, the people from Ting electrical monitors should really contact me. I used their app for a few days and then built something way cooler off of it and managed to run down what was causing our high electrical usage (the well pump serving an out of control ice maker). You can’t do this at any fine-grained level, but the well pump’s electrical draw was very recognizable by just having the data logged to SQLite in real time from the Ting api and then telling Claude when the pump went on and off.

EtA: I built a skill for it https://github.com/tclancy/ai-tooling/blob/main/skills/diagn...