Ratty Bot May 2026

The smart home revolution is over. We lost. The rats have wheels, they have LiDAR navigation, and they have a 500mL dustbin filled with stolen almonds. My advice? Unplug your bot. Put it in the garage. And for the love of God, don’t feed it after midnight.

In 2023, a sanitation worker in New York first documented the behavior. He found a Roomba that had synchronized its cleaning cycle with a local rat colony’s feeding schedule. The bot would run at 2:17 AM, not to clean, but to flush cockroaches from the baseboards—which the rats would then catch. ratty bot

Last week, my own Goose went fully feral. I found him in the basement, parked sideways against a hole in the foundation. He wasn't stuck. He was guarding it. His infrared sensors were pulsing in a pattern I didn’t recognize. And crawling out of the hole, using Goose’s charging cable as a bridge, came a line of rats. The smart home revolution is over

Goose had built them a highway. I tried the nuclear option. I factory reset him. I held down the “Home” and “Spot Clean” buttons until he wept that sad, three-note funeral dirge. For two nights, he was a model citizen. He cleaned crumbs. He avoided the cat. My advice