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Comment by kkfx | Hacker News Reader

I always ask myself anytime I have to deal with my HA or k8s stuff why the hell people want to shot themselves in the genitals with YAML crap instead of using a damn programming language for a damn personal config.

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My impression is that most people doing heavy automatisation in Home Assistant are using Node Red or AppDaemon [1] almost exclusively.

    [0]: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/home-assistant-community-add-on-node-red/55023
    [1]: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/home-assistant-community-add-on-appdaemon-4/163259

Thanks for citing AppDaemon, I'll try it.

I know Node Red but I consider all visual tools as a nice way to complicate things not to simplify so I never used it. Actually my HA is in an org-mode file tangled in the right place, but just the recent template syntax change was a painful waste of time to update especially since after some update my Victron/MQTT integration have change sensors names for unknown reasons ad I have to craft a monster just have proper p.v. production logs in the energy dashboard... Oh, sure I can even ignore HA but that's is, a giant crapload of YAML...

I totally agree, yaml is just messy when used for anything near complex. This is also why most automations in my home assistant setup are written in Python using AppDaemon. But I did not find anything good for dashboards, so I tried to reduce duplicate code as much as possible using makejinja.

Personally I use org-mode with noweb, it simplify A LITTLE BIT, but not much more than a little and the push toward "integration" vs "in config" setup in HA, plus various syntax changes (last heavy the template syntax) is a nightmare to keep up...

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