Home Assistant YAML Sandbox

An AppDaemon-powered dashboard, driven by the code in this repo.

This repo was created becuase I stopped managing my YAML configs for Home Assistant directly and trusted the UI to keep all that in order. But then Cursor happened. And now I want at least some automations / scenes / cards / sensors YAML in the same repo so it can be used as context to spin up others.

Right now I am just copy pasting into this repo Home Assistant, iterating on things, then saving back into Home Assistant via it's YAML editor UI. This feels pretty good so far because I don't need to worry about screwing too much up but it's obviously flawed in how quickly things can get out of sync. Longer term I may write a script that pulls certain things from my /config folder into here.

The driver for using Cursor for some automations & scripts was because gpt-5.2 was crushin each one in isolation but once I added depenencies across scripts and states I needed something with wider context.

Automations & Scripts

There's a handful of automations and scripts in here. Some were originally made with the UI and now here so I don't miss small updates and others got wild.

This repo started as a folder with the scripts in scripts\inovelli\generic to work out a few kinks between suspending the occupancy basaed lighting (or putting it "on hold"). Each switch had a toggle to enable / disable the automations and pramas that contributed to this but I wanted a "hold all" automation on top of that. The switch click hold needed to take precedent over the "hold all" so I introduced two states of being "on hold". Things got more complex from there but has been a breeze to manage w/ Cursor and GPT-5.2.

Cards

I found mmWave sensors to take a bit of tuning their config to work out a few kinks. Before I installed the inovelli switches I was doing this a dump of entity history and current states. I got a bit carried away here but want to upgrade my other dashboards and use bubble cards so took the oppertunity to dig in.

Occupancy Based Lighting Popup

I use a button to open a popup bubble card that shows the basics of what I want to tweak and monitor a zone of lights controlled by motion & presence sensors. This has been very useful when a zone turns on unexpectedly. I can quickly see which sensor popped it and make some quick adjustments like setting an interference zone.

Advanced Settings Popup

The button at the top of each popup lets you navigte back and forth. This card is a bit more verbose and gets into settings you wouldn't be changing much. It's nice to make small changes and monitor the zone until things are rock solid.