Home Assistant GitHub Notifications: How Joanna Finds Nightly Automation Ideas

I finally scratched an itch that had been building for a while. I wanted Joanna to review the unread notifications from the GitHub repositories I watch, ignore the noise, and surface only the ideas that could actually improve my Home Assistant setup.

The result is a nightly scout workflow. Joanna reviews watched-repo notifications, looks for feature-level inspiration, opens research issues for the best ideas, rolls the rest into a digest issue, and marks notifications read only after they have been processed cleanly.

The problem

GitHub notifications are a terrible backlog if your goal is inspiration instead of triage. I do not want every bug report, regression, dependency bump, or support thread in front of me. I want new automations, better entity patterns, dashboard ideas, helper tricks, and reusable enhancements.

Before this change, the useful ideas were buried in the same stream as everything else. That meant good Home Assistant ideas either showed up too late or never got turned into action.

The fix

I added a nightly Home Assistant package that dispatches Joanna and lets the heavier GitHub review logic run in BearClaw. The Home Assistant side stays clean and simply hands off the work through an existing dispatch script.

• Only unread notifications from watched repositories are reviewed.
• Bugfixes, regressions, compatibility repairs, support requests, and troubleshooting threads are filtered out.
• Strong candidates create research issues in my public repo.
• Recap-only findings are grouped into one digest issue so I can review them on my own time.
• Notifications are marked read only after the item has been processed successfully.

You can see the Home Assistant package here: GitHub Watched Repo Scout package.

Bonus win

The digest ended up being the part I liked most. Instead of creating busywork, Joanna now gives me a curated shortlist. On one live run the recap items were rolled into a single digest issue, while the stronger ideas became actionable research issues like #1600 and #1601.

I also wired the dispatch through the same kind of webhook pattern I have leaned on for years, and I log the handoff so it is easy to trace in the Home Assistant logbook.

Result

I no longer need to babysit my GitHub inbox looking for inspiration. Joanna does the first pass every night, keeps the scope on features and enhancements, and leaves me with two outputs that are actually useful: immediate research issues and a recap digest.

That is the right split for me. Strong ideas become work. Interesting-but-not-urgent ideas stay visible without turning into clutter.

Home Assistant fill

The Home Assistant side is intentionally small. It just schedules the handoff and passes a clear source and summary into Joanna:

- service: script.joanna_dispatch
  data:
    source: "home_assistant_automation.github_watched_repo_scout_nightly"
    summary: "Nightly GitHub watched-repo scout review for Home Assistant ideas"

That keeps the package maintainable and leaves the GitHub analysis, labeling, recap digest creation, and mark-read behavior in the Joanna runtime where it belongs.

Draft generated with help from Codex