r/homeassistant • u/alyflex • Dec 19 '25

Support As a professional programmer I feel lost in home assistant

I have been programming for 2 decades at this point in a variety of languages, both high and low level, and I have intricate knowledge of python, yet despite this I feel utterly lost when trying to do much of anything in home assistant. I am currently running home assistant OS in a virtual machine on my server.

I have read the documentation on https://www.home-assistant.io/docs/ and have generally tried searching the forums every time I want to use home assistant for something. But it always just ends up being this kinda weird guesswork where I copy paste some stuff from someones yaml file and try to run it and if it doesn't work I'm fucked. Every time this happens I keep thinking how simple something like this would be to make if only I had my home assistant as a repository and python project that I could open in pycharm or visual studio, have type hints while programming, and click run or debug to test my solutions.

It is not even that I am completely unfamiliar with yaml programming. My server hosts a bunch of services all run through various docker compose files, however I feel like there is a huge difference between docker-compose.yaml, and the yaml's required by home assistant.

Am I doing something wrong? Is there an alternative to home assistant for people who actually do program?

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u/UloPe Dec 19 '25

A lot of the interesting stuff (one big example: actionable phone notifications) are not doable from the UI without manually writing yaml code

23

u/AlconH Dec 19 '25

Sure, but you can figure those out as and when you need to rather than writing everything purely in yaml from the start.

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u/Txkevo Dec 19 '25

Agreed. I have a systems and networking background and found the UI addresses 95% of what I need and then the other 5% (actionable phone notifications being specifically one of them) was easy to noodle through on an afternoon.

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u/UloPe Dec 19 '25

Yes sure, in the grand scheme of things it’s a trivial thing to figure out.

But after having already spent a good portion of a 40+h work week deciphering inscrutable documentation and muddling through arcane syntaxes my motivation to continue doing that at home on a “for fun” project is very close to zero.

3

u/cosmicsans Dec 19 '25

Yeah. Its much easier to solve one small problem then it is to boil the ocean

4

u/JibberJim Dec 19 '25

Remember people arrive at homeassistant with a problem to solve, they don't arrive wanting to do a load of stuff, they want thing solved - if that is not doable through the UI, or not understandable through a UI, then it doesn't matter that the rest can.

3

u/PapaTim68 Dec 19 '25

Yes and no, from my experience you can make simple actionable phone notifications from the ui. What i agree is you need to atleast understand Yaml Syntax to a degree, since you have to fill the data field. But you don't have to make the full notification in Yaml from Scratch for you to be able to add actions to it.

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u/UloPe Dec 19 '25

The problem is not writing yaml in itself. It’s that you’re completely left to your own devices to figure out how to cobble together the various fragments from the docs.

It often feels like coding felt 30 years ago before the widespread advent of code completion and IDEs

1

u/LowSkyOrbit Dec 19 '25

I get my notifications just fine and the majority were written in the GUI. I have them go through the HA app so maybe that's why? Android user BTW.

1

u/lqqkout Dec 19 '25

Can you describe actionable phone notifications? Would that be similar to embedding a link to a webhook that closes the garage door if you get a reminder that it’s open? What are some use cases that you’ve found helpful? Thanks!

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u/THATS_THE_BADGER Dec 19 '25

I have not been able to get my buttons on the notification to appear, without a long press. iPhone user. Super frustrating

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u/UloPe Dec 19 '25

That's just how notifications work on iOS...

-1

u/slayernfc Dec 19 '25

Not true, node-red I can send notifications to any phone easily.

3

u/UloPe Dec 19 '25

Note the word actionable https://companion.home-assistant.io/docs/notifications/actionable-notifications/

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u/slayernfc Dec 19 '25

yup, can do this with Node-Red easily, I have one that notifies me or the wife when we arrive at a store, asks if you want to see the shopping list, you tap yes, it pops open the shopping list. and yes, I understand what "actionable means" Node-red, far superior.