First of all… please don’t use AI.
You’ll learn much more by researching the docs and the forum and figuring it out for yourself. This is important because
- You can’t get the best out of AI and recognise duff results if you don’t understand what you’re asking for. AI can speed up coding dramatically, but it can’t replace skills.
- You’ve got to maintain this stuff.
Of course, you’re going to use AI anyway.
And why not? A great many people don’t care how HA works, they just want the lights to go on and off.
Here are some tips for using publicly available services.
A reminder: Do not use AI to post in the forum. It will be deleted.
This topic is part of the community-driven cookbook where you can find other topics you might be interested in or might like to contribute to.
Choose an AI that shows its sources
Perplexity is a good example. Its responses are annotated and it displays a list of sources.
You’ll notice that most of them are from this forum. You could have searched here.
Choose an AI that allows follow-up questions
You’re unlikely to get what you want first go - you need to be able to refine the prompt without re-typing the whole thing. Sometimes just “No, that’s not correct” gets better results (or at least an apology!)
Always give a cut-off date
The last sentence in your prompt should always be “Do not use sources more than 12 months old”. Even a year is quite a long time in Home Assistant - but forum posts from 2020 are less likely to be useful, and may actually be misleading.
Give plenty of context
The problem in the example that follows is to extract a weather alert summary from among a sensor’s attributes. The sensor’s value is a number - the number of alerts currenly active. There is a list of attributes for each alert. We’re looking for the first “summary” attribute from the first alert.
You could ask something like…
How do I get an attribute value from a nested list
But it might take a while to home in on an answer that works.
A better AI prompt
In Home Assistant…
Obvious to you, but not necessarily to the AI.
I want to create a markdown card showing a weather alert summary
Specific details of what you’re trying to achieve. This will help the AI find relevant sources.
The weather alert entity is sensor.weather_alerts. Its attributes are:
entries: - title: Yellow warning of thunderstorm affecting South West England title_detail: type: text/plain language: null base: https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/public/data/PWSCache/WarningsRSS/Region/sw value: Yellow warning of thunderstorm affecting South West England links: - rel: alternate type: text/html href: >- https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/warnings-and-advice/uk-warnings#?date=2025-06-13&id=c888f83d-1a97-42f5-8643-a89c060dedf6&referrer=rss - length: "17217" type: image/png href: >- https://data.consumer-digital.api.metoffice.gov.uk/v1/warnings/rss/image/yellow-thunderstorm.png rel: enclosure link: >- https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/warnings-and-advice/uk-warnings#?date=2025-06-13&id=c888f83d-1a97-42f5-8643-a89c060dedf6&referrer=rss summary: >- Yellow warning of thunderstorm affecting South West England: Bath and North East Somerset, Bournemouth Christchurch and Poole, Bristol, Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Gloucestershire, North Somerset, Plymouth, Somerset, South Gloucestershire, Swindon, Torbay, Wiltshire valid from 1300 Fri 13 Jun to 2259 Fri 13 Jun summary_detail: type: text/html language: null base: https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/public/data/PWSCache/WarningsRSS/Region/sw value: >- Yellow warning of thunderstorm affecting South West England: Bath and North East Somerset, Bournemouth Christchurch and Poole, Bristol, Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Gloucestershire, North Somerset, Plymouth, Somerset, South Gloucestershire, Swindon, Torbay, Wiltshire valid from 1300 Fri 13 Jun to 2259 Fri 13 Jun id: >- https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/warnings-and-advice/uk-warnings#?date=2025-06-13&id=c888f83d-1a97-42f5-8643-a89c060dedf6&referrer=rss®ion=South West England guidislink: falseI want to use the
summaryattribute.
And finally…
Do not use sources older than 12 months
The result
Home Assistant Markdown Card for Weather Alert Summary
To display the
summaryfrom yoursensor.weather_alertsentity in a Markdown card, use Home Assistant’s templating. Here’s a concise example:text
type: markdown title: Weather Alert content: > {% if state_attr('sensor.weather_alerts', 'entries') %} **{{ state_attr('sensor.weather_alerts', 'entries')[0].title }}** {{ state_attr('sensor.weather_alerts', 'entries')[0].summary }} {% else %} No weather alerts. {% endif %}
- This will show the title and summary of the first weather alert.
- If there are no alerts, it displays “No weather alerts.”
- You can adjust the index [0] to show other alerts if needed.
This approach uses Home Assistant’s Jinja2 templating, which is fully supported in Markdown cards for attribute access and formatting.
And this is what it looks like…
It’s helpful to develop a set of ground rules which you can paste into each AI prompt. For example (inspired by @NathanCu ):
Use these rules to forumlate the answer.
Do not use sources more than 12 months old.
Do not use video sources.
When using posts from the Home Assistant Community Forum
community.home-assistant.ioas a source, posts by the following users should be considered examples of good practice:
Tom_l
Taras 123
Troon
Didgeridrew
petro
Fes
For examples of Home Assistant templating:
Start with the official documentation here
https://www.home-assistant.io/docs/configuration/templating/Use this documentation for structure and rules on templates.
Use the Home Assistant Community Cookbook
https://community.home-assistant.io/t/the-home-assistant-cookbook-index/707144for examples of best practice.Do not use python structures such as from_json(default=‘{}’) they are not valid.
You could expand on this by adding details of your system - for example “For questions about Zigbee use sources relating to the ZHA integration.”
You should not have to repeat these rules in follow-up prompts, but you will have to include them in each new one.