I spent the last few days refactoring some automations and scripts, and I'm getting really frustrated with the autocomplete feature. It seems fine for very simple editing, but once you start changing things it just adds in extra quotes or braces w/o considering the full context of the line.
Frankly, I don't really need or want the extra "help" and wondering if others are having a similar reaction. (Well, my reaction turned out to be quite a bit of swearing at my laptop...)
It has definitely not made things easier for me. Maybe it will get better, but until then I'd love to be able to disable it.
I keep ending up with yaml like this which just takes more time to clean up.
- action: system_log.write
data:
mesasge: Bla {{}} foo }}""""
While I'm asking, would any of you like to be able to default to yaml mode for the script/automation editor? Or at least retrain yaml mode when switching between traces and back to editiing?
Yes... I'm not finding it easy to get used to... I end up with a lot of {%%%} and {{}}}. I also get real annoyed with the functions because they always use double quotes in the args... out of habit I use them around the template, so I get end up with annoying errors from that.
What I didn't mention is working in the the Dev Tools -> Template window is worse since I'm not just filling in an automation or script but actively trying different snippets of templates. The more you move things around the more the autocomplete gets in the way.
Not only that, here's an autocomplete after selecting "state_attr" from the drop-down:
{{ state_attr("entity_id", "attribute")}}
Now there's 18 characters (or 22 with quotes) to backspace away.
Again, this is great if you are just starting out, I suppose, but seems a bit counterproductive otherwise. Being able to configure it off would be nice.
My current practice is this.
a) do automation and package development on a copy of my HA config
b) use vscode / Claude sonnet 5.6 to develop the package / automation content. It is now very good, pretty accurate and much faster than anything I can do.
c) deploy changes into HA and restart HA
With the advances in 5.6 I will never be writing templates or automations from scratch again or using a UI. Those days are gone.
I still need to use the Dev Tools Templates feature to test snippets and see how to deal with different states, etc. So, I really would rather not have HA make that part more difficult, which I'm finding the autocomplete does.
I use Claude, too. It's been very helpful for writing integrations where it saves a huge amount of time due to the volume of code. Plus, you can ask Claude about why it added each line, which is quite educational.
Automations typically aren't really that complex where I would need AI to write them -- and packages (and template sensors) really help to build up functionality into neat bundles. By the same argument (most automations are not that complex) AI is probably a great solution.
Don't want to morph into another AI thread, but I suspect the AI use explains the drop in traffic here. It's just so much easier, faster, and sometimes better to get AI to help with what is typically a not terribly complex tasks one is trying to do in HA.
The AI does get things wrong and one byproduct of that is I've seen people here insist that what they are doing is the right way because AI said so. It's a bit of confirmation bias - or maybe the sycophantic AI being a bit too helpful... Turns out you do need humans to politely show you a better way[1].
I fell like the new-ish purpose-specific triggers and conditions that have been added to the UI are great, but just a bit too late. I suspect that it won't be long where describing what you want an automation to do via AI will be the norm. Then those YAML skills will come into play to fix it...
[1] It's pretty remarkable how Claude will lead me down a path so agreeably and authoritatively and then completely change direction when questioned.