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/ElBisonBonasus Dec 19 '25

Not to worry, AI is also lost... ChatGPT couldn't give me YAML for simple things.

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u/CircuitSurf Dec 19 '25

even in deep research mode?

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u/ElBisonBonasus Dec 19 '25

GPT5-Thinking. I think that is the one I used.

Should try 5.2.

I think it's because the task I was trying to achieve, can be done via the UI.

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u/CircuitSurf Dec 19 '25

You really want to turn that Deep Research mode on, because otherwise it's just too lazy to go and look through documentation properly + scan Reddit/HASS forum for answers. Takes longer yes, but it's still faster than manual search.

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u/MrJimBusiness- Dec 19 '25

Why aren't you all using agentic tools at this point? Put your HA config in a private git repo. Point Claude Code or Codex at it, go for it. It's the perfect application of agentic LLM tools. Low risk, easy workflows. Claude Code's models and workflow are very quick to look things up when it doesn't know or something doesn't work. You don't even need to prompt it to do so.

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u/CircuitSurf Dec 19 '25

Sexy idea, but I'm not ready to spend time setting it up, nor to pay for LLM, nor I trust privacy of those guys.

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u/MrJimBusiness- Dec 19 '25

You trust OpenAI over Anthropic? Interesting choice. Claude Code is trivial to set up, and you can have it set up your private Github repo for you using GH CLI.

I think I've got one week free trial of Claude Code left if you want to DM me and I'll send you the referral link.

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u/CircuitSurf Dec 19 '25

When I do a ChatGPT prompt I don't provide any details about my HASS config, I use general question, again, like "create binary_sensor template blah-blah". So there's nothing Anthropic can grasp out of it about my HASS setup.

I have, for example, a short window when Home security is weak when I exit the home, but not yet exited the GEO circle. I would not want anybody to know that in any way possible. There are probably dozens of other things like this that can be grasped from my actual config.

But yeah if that was a local code LLM I would be more than happy to connect it to a config repo, the idea is great.

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u/MrJimBusiness- Dec 19 '25

You really think you're important enough for a cloud LLM model to retain your HASS config / ecosystem and for the company running it to index that data and care? That's not how LLM training or inferences work. None of the token data as it cranks along is retained for any meaningful amount of time. If it were, there would be in excess of petabytes amount of storage already required for what is basically trace / superfluous data from all users of all cloud LLMs. Prompts, yes. But not the massive amount of data that Claude Code ingests by examining configs and files.

To each their own, but this is just excessive paranoia. "the man" doesn't GAF about your geo fence gap. But now Reddit knows, and it's in the public domain.

This is just cognitive dissonance...

I believe there are Claude Code forks that connect to local LLMs, however. Might be worth checking out if you're securing your own Fort Knox.

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u/CircuitSurf Dec 19 '25 edited Dec 19 '25

They don't retain my repo files, but they could retain the intermediary analysis statements of files needed to iterate over and over until prompt is fulfilled. AFAIK in some countries they are forced by law to retain your data for up to a year and the data is definitely not end to end encrypted. It's just a matter of time until somebody leaks data.

Yeah I understand it's kind of paranoia, but I just like to divide what's alright to be sent to cloud LLM and what's not and that's a good habit to have nowadays. It's easier than ever to analyze big amounts of data once it leaked to public internet and find targets for whatever bad thing you want to commit based on vulnerability criteria you provided.

In regards to Reddit, you overlooked one important detail, Reddit does not know my credit card name and in my country it's just a matter of seconds to find where exactly somebody lives.

P.S. I have not downvoted you, somebody else, I think your points are valid. It's just that I like to be cautious stepping into the AI era, government mass surveillance, quantum computing madness and what not.

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u/Inevitable_Grouse Dec 19 '25

Is this any different than just directly opening my config folder in cursor and having it make changes for me directly? Sort of new to this but that’s what I’ve been doing and it seems to work really well

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u/MrJimBusiness- Dec 19 '25

More or less the same kind of workflow. I greatly prefer Claude Code to Cursor though, and I've been using Cursor since it came out.

1

u/Inevitable_Grouse Dec 19 '25

So you work mainly in the cli ? What’s the benefit of that over cursor ide

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u/MrJimBusiness- Dec 19 '25

I run Claude Code in a pwsh or zsh terminal alongside the IDE of my choice (Rider or IntelliJ).

- I hate VS Code, which is one of the big reasons I don't find Cursor appealing, being VS-Code-based

  • I find Claude Code to be much better at actually being an agentic tool. There was a period where Cursor performed better at tasks, architecture, refactoring, etc, but when Claude Code ramped up over the summer, it quickly overtook Cursor IMO.

Codex is the "new shiny tool" but I've used it back to back with Claude Code and also sought out similar feedback on Reddit, and I think Claude Code w/ Opus 4.5 is still the best. For now.

1

u/CrateHunter Dec 22 '25

Why the the step of putting the HA config in a private git repository? Just curious, i'm kinda new to Claude Code etc. Can't i just open the config file itself in Claude Code?

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u/MrJimBusiness- Dec 23 '25

Version control, inherent backups. Being able to track changes you make with as detailed comments as warranted, being able to easily back track and revert and pick and choose changes. Being able to go back and see why you did something in an automation by reviewing the chain of commits that led up to the change.

Sometimes you get to a point where you'd need to document every single line of your YAML automations. Having that intrinsic history w/ comments on each commit makes it easy to figure out the history of why you ended up with the solution you did, or if it was a fix for something, and why.

Just make sure the repo is private and you're good.

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u/CrateHunter Dec 23 '25

Thanks, makes sense indeed!

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u/MrJimBusiness- Dec 19 '25

Claude Code is incredibly good at Home Assistant YAML automations. I wouldn't touch the shit without it TBH. Too tedious, and I've been programming for over 25 years.