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Comment by rcarmo | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been trying HA yearly (as my home set up is essentially HomeKit/homebridge with Node-RED bolted on to expose unsupported devices) and it always strikes me as very declarative and finicky to configure, requiring either maintaining a bunch of YAML files or clicking through screen after screen of longish forms.

I wonder if there are any plans to make the UX feel simpler and less crowded…

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Ive just gotten started, but what I like so far is based on node-red but only using HA triggers, functions, and HA call service nodes.

Essentially I use the trigger blocks to schedule my function calls. The function then ignores the inputs entirely and just inspects the variables from home assistant that it cares about, it then sends this output to any devices I want to toggle.

This way, I'm just writing code. This works naturally for me, since it's my day job. But I can use node-red for visually organizing input output tuples, and the debugging data that it shows as things activate.

I also add one manual trigger and one debug output node on each end of the function so I can just run it manually if desired.

So far it's pretty goos, but I'm missing stuff like writing tests, which means I test my functions by turning on/off devices or something which isn't ideal.

I think that is priority 1 for them, after starting as a yaml first system, you can now even add automation using natural language (never used that though). It will get less complicated for sure. As for the "crowded", I think that's up to you.

It already is. With the latest changes, almost everything can be done through the UI, hardly ever I touch YAML files.

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