It was a perfectly normal evening. I built an automation, started it — and it simply didn’t do what it was supposed to. No error in the logs. No red bar. Just: nothing.
After twenty minutes of searching, I found the mistake. And then something became clear to me: That wasn’t a one-off slip. That was a pattern.
My first video on the 5 most common automation mistakes was a hit back then — the comments went wild. And many of you wrote: “I knew all of these and still do them anyway.” I get it. I really do.
Since then, quite a bit has changed in Home Assistant. New features, new possibilities — and a whole new category of traps to fall into. Trigger IDs, for example. Or AI-generated automations that look so plausibly correct — and then aren’t.
I’ve picked out five of them. Five new mistakes I had to learn the hard way myself — and that I keep seeing when talking to the community. Some are insidious because the mistake only surfaces weeks later. One of them costs you all the progress of a running automation — at exactly the moment you least expect it.
Five mistakes that sound more harmless than they are
Mistake 1: The Trigger ID Trap
Trigger IDs are one of the features that have genuinely upgraded Home Assistant in recent years. You can finally consolidate multiple triggers in one automation and still tell them apart. Practical, elegant, modern.
And that’s exactly why this trap is so sneaky. Anyone who’s discovered the feature wants to use it for everything. Ten triggers, twelve conditions, a huge choose block — and at some point, actions fire that shouldn’t be firing at all. No error in the logs. Everything runs. Just wrong.
How to use trigger IDs properly — and where the line is — I show in the video.
Mistake 2: The light burns even when the sun’s still out
You built an automation: lights on at 6 PM. In October, that’s perfect. In March, the lamp is on while it’s still broad daylight outside. In December, you’ve been sitting in the dark for an hour.
Hard-coded times feel right when you set them up — and they get their revenge for the rest of the year. Most of us have at least one such automation hidden somewhere. Sometimes even several.
The good news: Home Assistant has everything you need to solve this permanently. What exactly — you’ll see in the video.
Mistake 3: The silent total loss
This is the mistake that surprised me most — and at the same time the one most people completely underestimate. You build an automation with a long wait action. Everything runs. At some point you apply an update. Home Assistant restarts.
And your automation? It remembers nothing. No hint, no log, no error message. The progress is simply gone. That can mean: a reminder is never sent. A lamp stays on. A door remains unnoticed open.
There’s an elegant solution for this — and it’s simpler than you’d think. But it requires a change of thinking. I explain how in the video.
Mistake 4: The script that silently refuses
Anyone who knows automation modes feels confident. Single, Restart, Parallel, Queue — that’s clear. But now here’s the trick question: Are you also keeping an eye on the modes of your scripts?
In the default mode Single, if a script is already running and gets called again, absolutely nothing happens. No error message. The script is simply ignored. Depending on your use case, your system then runs silently into the void — and you don’t know why.
Mistake 5: The automation that looks like a good idea
We use AI. That’s normal, that’s sensible, that’s fast. ChatGPT, Gemini, the built-in Home Assistant assistant — they can all deliver a first draft of an automation in seconds. And it looks good. Really good. Structured, plausible, commented.
The problem: ancient syntax from three-year-old training data. Entities that don’t even exist in your installation. Logic errors that only surface when they’ve already surfaced. AI code doesn’t check itself — you have to do that.
In the video, I show a real example and explain where you need to look especially carefully.
All five mistakes — with screenshots, real examples, and a look inside the automation editor — are in the video:
Write in the comments afterwards which mistake got you the most — just the number, e.g. “Mistake 3”. That’s how I know what’s really on your mind.
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― Joachim
→ If you want to secure your automations, the next step is security: Securing Home Assistant – 5 mistakes to avoid in your smart home