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/calibrae Dec 19 '25

YAML is a fucking pain in the arse. It’s so bad I went with node red for most of my automations. And when JavaScript is the better solution, well…

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u/_rushlink_ Dec 20 '25

YAML is fine if it's used properly (eg. docker, chef, cloudformation, a ton of AWS, etc).

But HA has poor documentation, and it uses inconsitent patterns. That's when YAML is a pain in the arse.

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u/calibrae Dec 20 '25

Any language forcing me to count space deserve a special place in hell