Ive changed entity naming scheme a couple of times now over the course of 1.5y orso. And once your HA is bloated with scripts automations etc, changing entity name is a nightmare. This is what i posted in Discord:
“Average Joe could add entities in the automations by name, but the backend silently uses an unique ID. Then Joe after a year decides to rename the entity in the entities list in the UI. Then coming back to the automation that name is automatically changed because HA picked up the new name from the ID. Joe doesnt care about the IDnumber, but now he has his entities sorted the way he likes”
I hope this idea contributes the user friendliness of Home Assistant.
Yes that is what i mean. Once you got your whole house setup, and entities are verymuch woven into every script/automations, things tend to break down very fast once you start changing/renaming entities to a point one can get lost. And boy its ugly when you save version 1 of a script, then change its contents a bit and the entity naming lags behind missing the whole purpose of the function of the improved script.
Therefor i suggest a way to rename entities freely by giving them a ‘behind the scenes’ unique identifier. That way you can play with entity names freely and they change automatically inside scripts/automations because they are bound to the ID, not the name.