I Replaced a $3,000 Security System With One AI Agent. Now It Calls Me.
A $50 camera, a Mac Mini, and Claude. It knows my family, knows my pets, and calls me when a stranger walks into the yard.
My dog Pepe does not like uninvited guests in our yard.
He handles the barking. But nobody covers the hours he sleeps.
That is why people pay for security systems.
Over a few years, a monitored system totals $2,000 to $3,000.
And here is what the money buys. A notification.
Your phone buzzes. You open the app. A stranger stands in your yard, in crisp 2K, and you are not home. You watch. That is the whole feature.
I needed a guard that never sleeps and tells me what it sees, not a camera that says something moved.
And this guard should know my family.
And when a stranger walks in, I do not want a buzz in my pocket. I want my phone to ring.
So I built it.
What we’ll build
An AI agent that watches my yard through a $50 camera.
It runs on a Mac Mini. When the camera spots a person, the agent grabs a frame, looks at it, and explains it to me, like this.
It knows Pepe. It knows the cat.
It even knows my wife’s mother and my baby, Eva.
And it’s working when the motion started.
Setting up the House Guard
I’ll show you how I built it in five steps.
I’ll also share the exact scripts and prompts that do the job.
For higher accuracy, you could use face recognition. But I kept my system intentionally simple. It only recognizes four people, two dogs, and one cat.
Everyone else is simply classified as a stranger.
