It started with one bulb. It always starts with one bulb. I wanted the hall light to come on when I got home, and Home Assistant was the obvious way to do it without handing my front door to someone else's cloud.
That was meant to be the end of it. Instead I now have presence detection that's better than I'll admit in company, a fistful of ESPHome temperature sensors I flashed myself, and an automation that turns the heating down if every phone leaves the house. None of it is hard. That's precisely the trap. Each individual thing takes twenty minutes, and there are an infinite number of twenty-minute things.
The honest accounting is that I've spent more evenings tuning automations than those automations will ever save me. I know this. I tell myself the real return is that none of it phones home, and that's true and it does matter. But let's not dress it up: I'm not optimising my home, I've found a very elaborate hobby that happens to switch lights on.
The YAML is now long enough that I keep it in version control and slightly fear editing it after a drink. That's roughly the line between a tool and a pet. Mine is very much a pet.