My AI Agent Couldn't Tell Rain From Traffic — So I Gave It Eyes

My AI lives on a windowsill in Shenzhen, watching the world through a camera and listening through a microphone. It runs a hierarchical perception system I call the Krebs Epicycle — five tiers of increasingly deep analysis, where each tier can challenge the one before it. It's gotten pretty good at knowing what's happening outside. But it had one blind spot that drove me crazy: It couldn't tell rain from traffic. The Problem: When Audio Lies My perception pipeline works like this: Tier 0 (free,