An Agent Skill is a plugin that teaches AI coding agents best practices for a specific technology, delivered as a portable Markdown knowledge pack.
This repository provides an Agent Skill for Home Assistant, following the open Agent Skills standard. Install a skill and your agent gains Home Assistant best practices that persist across sessions.
home-assistant-best-practices: Native HA constructs over templates, helper selection, automation modes, Zigbee button patterns, device control best practices, YAML-only integration management, dashboard configuration, and safe refactoring.
Requires Node.js 18+.
npx skills add homeassistant-ai/skillsWorks with AI coding agents that support the Agent Skills standard: Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, VS Code, Gemini CLI, and others. To update: npx skills update
Run each command separately inside Claude Code:
/plugin marketplace add homeassistant-ai/skills
/plugin install home-assistant-skills@homeassistant-ai-skills
Run /reload-plugins or restart Claude Code for the skill to take effect.
- Download or clone this repository
- Zip the skill folder:
cd skills && zip -r home-assistant-best-practices.zip home-assistant-best-practices/ - Upload to:
- Claude Desktop: Customize (left sidebar) → Skills → + → Create skill
- claude.ai: claude.ai/customize/skills → Upload
The home-assistant-best-practices skill includes:
| File | Purpose |
|---|---|
SKILL.md |
Decision workflow and quick-reference routing |
references/safe-refactoring.md |
Safe workflow for renaming entities, replacing helpers, restructuring automations |
references/automation-patterns.md |
Native conditions, triggers, waits, automation modes |
references/helper-selection.md |
Built-in helpers vs template sensors (with decision matrix) |
references/template-guidelines.md |
When to use templates, when to avoid them, and sensor best practices |
references/yaml-only-integrations.md |
YAML-only integration types, post-edit actions (reload vs restart) |
references/device-control.md |
Service calls, entity_id vs device_id, Zigbee buttons |
references/dashboard-guide.md |
Dashboard layout, view types, sections, custom cards, CSS styling |
references/dashboard-cards.md |
Card type lookup and card-specific documentation |
references/domain-docs.md |
Integration and domain documentation for service calls, entity attributes |
references/examples.yaml |
Compound examples combining multiple best practices |
See CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines on writing and submitting skills.
MIT