Home assistant 26.8 update…
Many device IDs have been changed breaking automations.
Heads up for anyone using Device Actions in Home Assistant UI
If a recent update broke a bunch of your automations or flooded you with repairs, check if you built them using Device Actions in the UI picker. When HA updates or re-indexes hardware, it can generate brand-new 32-character device_ids, leaving your old ones marked as unknown/broken.
DO NOT use the built-in HA UI Repair tool to fix them.
If you use the UI repair wizard to re-bind the device, HA completely wipes out your custom settings. Any delays, power thresholds, presets, or option values tied to that block get nuked back to defaults, forcing you to manually re-enter everything.
The fast way to fix it:
Open automations.yaml in Studio Code Server or File Editor.
Grab the new device_id for your device.
Use global Find & Replace (Ctrl + H) to swap the old ID with the new ID across the file.
Doing a quick Find & Replace takes 10 seconds and keeps all your custom delays, presets, and values completely intact.
Long term? Ditch Device Actions in the UI and switch to Entity Actions (entity_id). That way HA updates can never break your automation IDs again.
Don’t ask my how I know lol. I had 100 automations break on last update because I was lazy and used device and not entity. Half of my voice notifications, occupancy automations that had conditions and actions using lights and smart plugs that use occupancy or other power values, presets/playlist stopped working.
I have a mishmash of both but never bothered to move them all over to entities. What is the best way to scan through everything at once to get a list of which ones are using the device ID’s to go in to fix them? TIA
What I did is use repairs to see the broken if using spook it will give the ID that can be found in the report copy that id. Then in automation yaml do f{and for that ID.. then using the repair report click the link to the automation look for the broken part and click HA UI has a automatic fix and chose new device go ahead and chose the right device sometimes more that one because two intergrations use the same device. Anyway change and then view yaml and copy the new ID
DO NOT save your changes in the ui .
In yaml editing paste that new is in replace all .
This will all automations they use that device.
Save and reload automationsnin dev tools.
I also had a bunch of scrips so do the same thing in scripts.yaml.
The reason for using Yaml is to fix several at once and you don’t have to edit the options like if you fixed in the UI editor
Thanks for this! I haven’t updated to 2026.8 yet, but this led me to take a look at my automations.yaml file, and surprisingly, for me, I only had one Device Action (I expected more lol).
When I installed HA and created my first automation, “Devices” was first on the list so that’s what I used (newbie mistake). Eventually, I learned it was better to use Entities. Thought I’d changed them all, but apparently I missed one, which I’ve since changed to entity.
Same here - I do use input_select’s increment function in one of my automations and that automation stopped working, this turned out to be the cause. There was no issue anywhere other than the automation not incrementing the number. I am just giving you a head’s up because it may have broken other things (I know it also broken decrement evidently too which I do not use) - I would think those would be totally unrelated, but I guess not!
I think Frenk is on vacation, otherwise I am sure he would have been all over this like white on rice. I would have fixed it in my local copy of spook and then throw away the fix when the next version comes out, but I have no idea what else might be broken in spook that would cause automations or scripts to not work properly, so I am disabling it for now until Frenk releases a fix.
TIA