Presets

A Preset Decides What an AI May Do

A preset decides what an AI may do to your Home Assistant after you press Proceed. Anything beyond Advise Only lets software act on your home without you doing the edit yourself. An AI can misread a ticket, and ticket text can be written by anyone who can reach your household's Home Assistant, including a guest or a hacked device. Start with Advise Only. Only widen it when you can undo the result (take a backup or snapshot first), and never give the agent a tool you would not give to a stranger who can talk you into things.

What the Agent Always Has

Every run starts with Home Desk's own tools, whatever preset is chosen:

• While reviewing (read-only): get_guide, get_ticket, list_tickets, get_stats, list_labels, list_categories and get_attachment (to look at a photo).
• After Proceed: all of those, plus add_comment, update_ticket and close_ticket.

What a Preset Is

A preset is a name for two lists of extra tools, taken from other MCP servers such as ha-mcp: the tools the agent may use while reviewing, and the tools it may use after Proceed. Review is always read-only, so the review list may contain only read-only tools. Presets and the choice between them live in config.json on the AI Dispatcher machine, never in Home Assistant, because a hacked Home Assistant could otherwise choose its own preset and approve its own request. Home Assistant does not know which preset is in use and cannot change it.

The Presets

The AI Dispatcher ships with one preset, Advise Only (advise-only), and both of its lists are empty. With it the agent can use only the Home Desk tools above: it reads the ticket, comments, and can close the ticket. You make any change to Home Assistant yourself. Start here.

"presets": {
  "advise-only": { "review": [], "change": [] }
},
"preset": "advise-only"

Every other preset is one you write. For example, a Fix Config preset that lets the agent read a state while reviewing and save an automation after you press Proceed:

"presets": {
  "advise-only": { "review": [], "change": [] },
  "fix-config": {
    "review": ["mcp__home-assistant__ha_get_state"],
    "change": ["mcp__home-assistant__ha_config_set_automation"]
  }
},
"preset": "fix-config"

The change is visible in Home Assistant and you can undo it. Be slower to allow anything that calls services, reloads integrations or restarts add-ons: it acts on the live house and is harder to undo. Don't write a preset for it until you trust the lower ones.

To switch, edit "preset" and save. The next pass (within 30 seconds) uses it, and no restart is needed. A name that is not in "presets" stops the AI Dispatcher before anything runs, so a typo can never widen the agent. Every run is recorded in state/dispatcher.log with the preset it used. If you set "preset", it replaces extra_tools_review and extra_tools_change.

The tool names come from the MCP server itself (its own tools/list). Take them from there, not from this page, and read each one before you allow it. Tools that edit things need a connection that can write. The read-only address from the ha-mcp add-on will not offer them, so also check that a write-capable address is something you want to keep on this machine (in secrets/, like the read-only one).