Device replace and invalid automations

[msavazzi (Massimo Savazzi)]

Team,
I’m having some issues and I’m not sure if I’m doing something wrong or we can submit a “new feature”
It happens to my home that I have to change devices (i.e. smart plug, the old one died so I got a new one, I have to change some integration,…)
I have more than 50 automations, some quite complex…
I’ve discovered that several of them were “broken”, in the sense not working as expected, because some of them still had the old item referred to.
I’ve not found a way to check the automations, nor a “replace device with” to check in homeassistant if a device or entity should be replaced.
It would be great to have an icon in the automation list showing that an automation has an issue/missing component and when I open it the same icon on the step that is involved with the issue/missing component.

Does it makes sense?

[francisp (Francis)]

Known issue, the warning is a sticky in community guides

Why and how to avoid device_ids in automations and scripts

Background When you start writing automations, a device trigger seems the obvious choice. Everybody knows what a device is and it comes at the top of the UI dropdown list. [Screenshot from 2025-11-20 18-37-55] It works… but it is not a the best way to start because it is storing up problems for the future. Far better to use an entity, with state or numeric_state. This topic is part of the community-driven cookbook where you can find other topics you might be interested in or might like to …

@msavazzi

It would be great to have an icon in the automation list showing that an automation has an issue/missing component

Install Spook, you get repairs if automations are missing something

[chairstacker]

If you are using ‘entity_id’ rather than ‘device’ in your automations and scripts:

I second the recommendation to install Spook - it’s a lifesaver when EntityIDs have changed.
You need to keep in mind though that Spook only flags an item if it’s not available any more, i.e. it has been removed or renamed.

If you have the old smart plug still enabled and the EntityIDs are still the same, it cannot flag it.
You can rename, e.g. switch.smart_switch to switch.smart_switch_old and Spook will pick it up.

Or you can use the file editor add-on to search through the automations.yaml and the scripts.yaml and replace the old entity_id with the new one (maybe even devices?) - but that’s a pain and will keep showing the old entities in your dashboards rather than the new ones.
And it completely fails if you have helpers based on the old EntityIDs.

[msavazzi (Massimo Savazzi)]

I followed the suggestion and used only entity ID not devices, also almost all of them are in readable format. But in any case I discovered several were invalid and did blocked automations

[msavazzi (Massimo Savazzi)]

@francisp I’ve done it and I love it Spook!

It would be great to have it in the standard HomeAssistant. In the end an automation with errors is not valid and could lead to messy resuts, having an icon or similar in the automations page makes a lot of sense