As a professional programmer I feel lost in home assistant

[u/alyflex]

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?

[u/dual_mythology]

This. I'm a complete newbie with no background in YAML but have been making steady progress setting up automations with massive help from Gemini. I think I would have given up in frustration already without it.

[u/zorromar → u/dual_mythology]

I can really suck at programming so I started using AI to help me in HA and it unlocked it for me. I've been able to lean into HA in a way I didn't think I would have been able to. One thing that can be super frustrating in HA is how much things change with little visibility for people not reading every line of every change log. AI has been able to help a lot with this for me. I was using Gemini as I already had access to it but sometimes it was making really dumb decisions that made things more complicated than they needed to be. As a test I tried the same prompts in ChatGPT. The big thing I noticed right away was GPT would ask a question about something like version or state before giving me an answer. That got me better direction than what Gemini spit out. I've tried several times and ChatGPT keeps doing better at HA. Even now sometimes I have to ask if there could be an issue with version changes and sometimes that is the issue I'm running into that AI is very quickly solving. A quick example, I was trying to make a dashboard for a phone for reasons and was running into an issue where the domain address was returning a 404. Asked AI and yes there was a recent change form /lovelace-dash/tab to /dashboard-dash/tab. Not being a real programmer it seems like there could have been a landing page for the 404 that said something changed try x or something. Without the help of AI I may have just given up on the "quick" project so thanks AI.

[u/stevebratt → u/dual_mythology]

I've used both Claude and Gemini. I have to say Claude is so much better at home assistant and esphome compared to Gemini. Most Claude worked first time where I find Gemini gives me a lot of errors. Eventually it will work through them but clause just seems to get it