--- title: Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains" is set today... description: Ray Bradbury's classic 1950 short story depicts a fully automated smart house in post-apocalyptic 2026 Allendale, California. The house continues its... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/ray-bradbury-s-there-will-come-soft-rains-is-set-today-2026-08-04--grifkyk3j twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains" is set today (2026-08-04) | daily.dev og:description: Ray Bradbury's classic 1950 short story depicts a fully automated smart house in post-apocalyptic 2026 Allendale, California. The house continues its... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/ray-bradbury-s-there-will-come-soft-rains-is-set-today-2026-08-04--grifkyk3j og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/GrifKYk3J.png og:image:alt: Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains" is set today (2026-08-04) og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains" is set today (2026-08-04) **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 7 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Ray Bradbury's classic 1950 short story depicts a fully automated smart house in post-apocalyptic 2026 Allendale, California. The house continues its programmed routines — cooking breakfast, cleaning, playing music, reading poetry — oblivious to the fact that its human inhabitants have been vaporized in a nuclear war. The story culminates in the house catching fire and burning down, with only a lone voice repeating the date. The embedded Sara Teasdale poem gives the story its title and central theme: nature's indifference to human extinction. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 1 discussion and 85 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-09-14). **TL;DR:** Commenters are largely delighted by the story's anniversary, marveling at what home automation it got right versus wrong, while side-threads debate privacy in smart devices, household robotics, and the still-present nuclear anxiety that made Bradbury's premise feel so urgent. **Sentiment:** 65% positive · 25% mixed · 10% skeptical **The case for** - The story's depiction of home automation holds up surprisingly well — many of the described technologies are now within reach or already exist. - The 1984 Soviet animated adaptation is praised as an excellent and even more unsettling interpretation of the story. - Bradbury's broader body of work and ideas (on the internet, on shopping malls) are remembered fondly as prescient and imaginative. - The embedded Sara Teasdale poem is highlighted as a beautiful and resonant piece in its own right. **The pushback** - The story's assumption that IoT automation would work without internet connectivity is called out as the most unrealistic element by modern standards. - Accurate robotic cooking and robot firefighting remain unsolved problems, showing how far reality still lags behind the story's vision. - Privacy concerns around data collection are seen as a real barrier to widespread smart-home adoption today. - The nuclear anxiety the story was born from hasn't gone away — commenters note ongoing geopolitical brinkmanship keeps the premise uncomfortably relevant. **By community** - hackernews (positive): Enthusiastic engagement with the story's anniversary, mixing literary appreciation with technical debates about home robotics, IoT privacy, and the eerie relevance of nuclear themes today. **Hottest debate:** Whether consumers genuinely care about data privacy in smart devices or simply prioritize cost and convenience. **Open questions** - What will be the first AI-powered home device to achieve truly widespread consumer adoption? - Will household robotics ever reach the safety and reliability threshold needed for close human proximity? - How much of the story's automated home vision is actually achievable today without cloud/internet dependency? **Highlights** > I read this story in 4th grade. It felt like the future. Now, it feels like most of the technology is within reach - at least, it could be built. The automated stove being the main exception. But the most unrealistic part of this story is how all the IoT automation continues to work in the absence of the Internet. > — [thrtythreeforty on hackernews · 4 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49169336) > > But the most unrealistic part of this story is how all the IoT automation continues to work in the absence of the Internet. It's actually one way this story about the apocalypse is more hopeful than the present day. We don't need the internet to make most of the things in that story work, but in our timeline we'd add it anyway to get and sell those good analytics. > — [troyvit on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49169556) > This clip is what introduced me to this story. This adaptation is heavily modified, but I think it adds to the whole thing. Soviet artists had an uncanny talent for making everything that's unsettling even more so. > — [Tade0 on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49168642) > "There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground, And swallows circling with their shimmering sound; And frogs in the pools singing at night, And wild plum trees in tremulous white, Robins will wear their feathery fire Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire; And not one will know of the war, not one Will care at last when it is done. Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree If mankind perished utterly; And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn, Would scarcely know that we were gone." - Sara Teasdale, 1918 Didn't see the inspiration for Bradbury mentioned here. I love this poem. There's also a great song-rendition of it by The Three D's, a folk group popular in the 50's. > — [jrsdav on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49169784) > Born in 1968 I missed “duck and cover” but rode the wave of Reagan brinkmanship with my skater friends until 1990, watching all the broadcast TV PSAs and songs and art about nuclear war. It was real. It pervaded daily life: the notion that two old white men were having a pissing contest with every human as disposable bargaining chips. And as always, 25% of the US population cheered for purification of the planet because Jesus was coming (see: Hal Lindsay). > — [mrloopex on hackernews · 3 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49168914) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49166491) · 199 points · 85 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Just You Wait, by Chris Shiflett](https://daily.dev/posts/just-you-wait-by-chris-shiflett-olgdvr9h6) · Brad Frost · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [What Science Fiction Tells Us About Our Changing Relationship With AI](https://daily.dev/posts/what-science-fiction-tells-us-about-our-changing-relationship-with-ai-zn03vj9de) · DEV · 2 upvotes · 1 comments - [Beachfront Property in Camarina](https://daily.dev/posts/beachfront-property-in-camarina-u4doi6t3v) · Matt Massicotte · 2 upvotes · 1 comments - [Medium](https://daily.dev/posts/medium-vzmxeymgn) · Medium · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#tech-news](https://daily.dev/tags/tech-news), [#automation](https://daily.dev/tags/automation) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/ray-bradbury-s-there-will-come-soft-rains-is-set-today-2026-08-04--grifkyk3j) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Ray Bradbury's \"There Will Come Soft Rains\" is set today (2026-08-04)","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/ray-bradbury-s-there-will-come-soft-rains-is-set-today-2026-08-04--grifkyk3j","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/ray-bradbury-s-there-will-come-soft-rains-is-set-today-2026-08-04--grifkyk3j"},"datePublished":"2026-08-04T12:22:25.788Z","dateModified":"2026-09-14T08:55:35.901Z","description":"Ray Bradbury's classic 1950 short story depicts a fully automated smart house in post-apocalyptic 2026 Allendale, California. 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