Does my home keep working if Charyl is offline?

Yes. Charyl is a conversation layered on top of your home, not the thing running it. Device state, sensor readings, the notification rules you’ve set up, and Home Assistant itself are all handled by the platform underneath her — none of it waits on an AI provider to be reachable.

If a cloud AI route is down, or a self-hosted model isn’t answering, what changes is narrow and specific: Charyl stops being able to hold a conversation with you. Your lights still turn on with the switch, your sensors still log readings, a notification rule you wrote still fires when its condition is met, and anything you already asked her to set up keeps working exactly as configured.

This is a property of how the system is built, not just a promise. Charyl proposes changes and issues confirmed commands; she doesn’t sit in the path that keeps the house itself running day to day. That’s also why she never acts without you: she drafts and asks, the underlying platform carries out only what you’ve approved, and the house doesn’t depend on her being available to keep doing what it already knows how to do.