Nabu Casa's plan as Home Assistant maintainers for making automation creation easier

[Hedda]

FYI; @matthiasdebaat and @jlpouffier from Nabu Casa posted a roadmap plan for making automation creation easier in Home Assistant, and it involves unwrapping triggers and conditions, allowing integrations to provide them, (like perhaps AI Automation Suggester?). See:

• https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/1j3dw3t/make_automation_creation_easier_our_plan_as_home/

Quote copy bellow (but better to fo to the reddit above if want to give feedback to Nabu Casa's user experince expert and project manager):

Make automation creation easier - Our plan as Home Assistant maintainers

matthiasdebaat posted 1-day ago in r/homeassistant

In the upcoming releases, we aim to make automation creation easier with u/jenova70. Please let us know your thoughts on our proposed solution to the issues we want to address.

Issues

Home Assistant's automation engine is one of the most powerful on the market, but this comes at a cost: It’s not the easiest to approach.

1. Triggers and conditions are hard to choose and configure

Entity and Numeric state triggers are powerful and flexible but can be challenging to understand, especially for those who are new to Home Assistant. Device triggers are easier to use, but these don't let us fully use the power of the automation editor.When we want to search on a common trigger, like motion or temperature, we won't get any results. As these are part of the State or Numerical state trigger.

2. Common triggers and conditions are complex to achieve

In order to perform seemingly easy tasks, we must understand how data flows into the internal state machine and how it is represented. For example:

• "When the target temperature of my thermostat goes above 22 degrees". Requires knowledge that this is an attribute, not a state.
• "When my front door opens". We need to understand that it's a binary_sensor, lock or cover.

3. Difficult to trigger something on a scope that is bigger than an entity

Automation is tightly coupled with the state machine. If something isn’t in the state machine, it’s difficult (or impossible) to automate. Currently, the only workaround is creating helpers to persist such data. For example:

• "When at least one light in the living room turns on". We have to create a group helper.

• "When any of my switches labeled always_on turns off". Labels are not available as trigger target. We can walk around that by creating some pretty advanced templates.

• "When presence is detected on the second floor". Areas are not available as trigger target.

Our solution

We plan to unwrap the triggers and conditions, allowing integrations to provide them. This is similar to what we did for actions. Integrations will define available triggers, conditions, and actions, which Home Assistant will then display in the automation editor. This will result in:

1. Generic triggers and conditions such as light, climate and fan. And specific such as Sonos or LG Web OS.
2. The ability to target areas, devices, and labels. Not just entities.
3. A more intuitive “Add Trigger/Condition” dialog that only shows relevant options and supports search.

With these improvements, we will be able to create automations like:

• "When there is motion in the living room area, turn on all living room lights"
• "When a leak is detected, and if no-one is home, send a notification"
• "When lights labeled xmas turn on, start the Christmas playlist in living room"

Of course, we will still be able to use the State and Numerical state triggers for more complex use cases.

First results from user test are great. We feel like we are heading in the right direction, but want to continue getting feedback from the community. How do you feel about these improvements? Is there anything we may have missed here? We're open for feedback!

Edit:
Small clarification what we mean by allowing integrations to provide triggers and conditions, like it does with actions:

Basically, the triggers & conditions will be provided by light, climate, cover, etc.

Maybe, MAYBE, in some very rare case, sonos could also provide a vary specific crazy one like “When a timer ends” (I know Sonos has timers on their speaker, and they already have actions associated to it)

But the meat of the triggers will be what is today called “Entity components” … domain basically

[ITSpecialist111]

Thanks for the poke!
I think this update is very promising. By unwrapping triggers and conditions, Home Assistant is addressing one of the key hurdles for new users – the complexity of configuring automations. Allowing integrations to provide their own triggers and conditions could:

• Simplify the user experience by displaying only relevant options (and even supporting search), making it much more intuitive when setting up automations.

• Enable more domain-specific and context-aware options (for example, targeting areas, devices, or labels), which can lead to more powerful and flexible automations without the need for workarounds like creating extra helpers or advanced templates.

• Potentially open the door for integrations like AI Automation Suggester to contribute even richer, more tailored suggestions – since the system would now natively understand and expose these finer-grained options. Today I achieve the suggestions in a similar way, as in it's impossible to look at everything, so it looks at new and a random section of 200 entities.

The challenge will be in striking the right balance between simplicity for beginners and the flexibility needed by advanced users. But overall, this roadmap seems like a positive step toward making automation creation more accessible and powerful.

I'm still trying to figure out a way to do multi-agents within HASS without going into Addon's, but with the power and flexibility needed, it might be the latter.

[Hedda]

The challenge will be in striking the right balance between simplicity for beginners and the flexibility needed by advanced users. But overall, this roadmap seems like a positive step toward making automation creation more accessible and powerful.

I'm still trying to figure out a way to do multi-agents within HASS without going into Addon's, but with the power and flexibility needed, it might be the latter.

Maybe you could try to reach out to Nabu Casa’s Jean-Loïc (JLo), Madelena, and Paulus to discuss what is specifically needed for allowing things like that to be enabled in integrations such as your AI Automation Suggester without addons?

From what I read it seems like both JLo and Paulus have publicly expressed that they see AI agents having a huge impact in the future for Home Assistant integrations with LLMs.

[ITSpecialist111]

Yeah that's not a bad shout. They are aware of this when it first created. I also used to work with Missy too in Microsoft :)