Two years and forty automations later, which ones did you keep and which did you quietly delete

I will defend kitchen motion lighting, because your problem is the timeout and not the concept. Fifteen minutes instead of two, plus a second sensor pointed at the worktop rather than the door, and it stopped turning off on people. The version everyone deletes is the version with one sensor and a ninety second timer.

Rough count from my house: forty three automations, seventeen still enabled. The survivors are all either safety related or something nobody has to notice, and everything that was clever is gone. Adaptive colour temperature lasted four days.

Kept: leak sensors, heating tied to presence, and one notification when the washing machine finishes. Deleted: everything that guessed what a person wanted based on a single sensor. The leak sensor alone paid for the entire setup when it caught a slow drip under the sink at four in the morning, and the plumber said another week and it would have been the floor.

The one I regret building was a good morning routine that opened blinds and started the kettle on a schedule. It worked perfectly, right up until anyone was ill or on holiday, and then it was a machine shouting at a sick person. Anything tied to a clock rather than to a person eventually becomes rude.

Keep the ones that fail safe. Delete the ones that fail confusing.

One test I use before keeping anything: if the hub is down for a day, does the house still work by hand? Anything that fails that test gets a physical switch or gets deleted, because eventually you will be away and someone else will be standing in your dark hallway.