I haven’t used home assistant much in earnest, but I have some gripes after dabbling:

- to get the most out of it, it wants to be installed as an “OS” on a dedicated device (like a raspberry pi). Without doing this, you can’t install add ons from the store. I’m guessing this might be because the add-ons themselves are packaged with docker?

- I went ahead and did what they wanted, and dedicated an entire raspberry pi to home assistant. But from there, it seemed extremely GUI oriented… I had to install an add on just to see my config files! I know plenty of people have had success keeping their configs in version control, but that seems to be fighting the current.

So as a particularly advanced user, I don’t think Home Assistant is for me. Which is perfectly fine!

Does anyone have any recommendations on home automation software for people who write code for a living? The main thing I’m after is a decent library of supported devices that I don’t have to reverse engineer and write SDKs for myself. I’d also like to dump any/all sensor readings and switch states into Prometheus and view data with grafana.

Usually you can do it yourself, because yes they are just docker containers. I don't use them myself as I don't find much use for most of them. The more important addon tool is HACS and that works in the stand alone docker container.

> But from there, it seemed extremely GUI oriented… I had to install an add on just to see my config files

Yes it's very GUI focused now, you can usually get to the basic yaml config in any screen though if you click through to manually configue that component. This was generally done because the yaml config method was a pain even for the tech literate... because yaml.

If you want proper code in HomeAssistant have a look at AppDaemon https://appdaemon.readthedocs.io/en/latest/HASS_TUTORIAL.htm... Makes it easy to use Python in HomeAssistant.

Alternatively there is Node-red https://nodered.org/ (js visual node programing automation) and huginn https://github.com/huginn/huginn (Python automation)

They will never offer as much integration as HA so I tend to find using HA as a dashboard/device integrator and then Node-red/AppDaemon for the actual automations to be more optimal.