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[Avery18]

I've been genuinely impressed with the capabilities of modern open source software for automating home and small business tasks. I'm currently using a combination of Node-RED, Home Assistant Core 2024.7, and a collection of Python scripts on a Raspberry Pi 4B cluster to manage everything from garden irrigation to inventory tracking for my small retail side business here in Florida. The individual components work well, but I'm struggling to create a cohesive, maintainable system; my current setup is a tangled web of flows and scripts that only I can understand, and making changes feels risky. With a limited time budget of maybe five hours a week for maintenance and improvements, I need to establish better practices. For those who have built similar automation ecosystems, what strategies or tools have you found most effective for documentation and system design at this scale? Should I be using a version control system like Git more rigorously for my Node-RED flows and configuration files, and are there any visual diagramming tools that integrate well to keep a living map of the entire system? Furthermore, how do you approach testing changes in a home automation environment where you can't easily spin up a full duplicate of your hardware setup?