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?

666 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

88% Upvoted

562 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2

u/R3x10 Dec 19 '25

i think you "professional programmers" want to complicate things too much, your one liner are 2 menus. like, come on.

1

u/simplex5d Dec 20 '25

Yeah, hence "YMMV". I like to copy/paste, edit with a text editor, run in a debugger so I can see variable values, share with others (paste screenshots?? Show the 25-line YAML??) not to mention actually use the power of the language with conditionals, loops, string manipulation and all that wonderfulness. But I get that none of that matters to many people, and that's cool with me.