What am I missing... aka why are items manually defined

ok - so maybe a super dumb question, but one think that confuses me about openhab is that most bindings seem to require the the manual creation/definition of all items in my environment. E.g. The Nest binding seems to require that I manually define everything… but via the API, all the items should be available. Insteon seems to be the same way.

I’m confused as to why this is automated (key word, right?) … or what am I missing?

Thanks

Bindings built for openHAB 2 and Eclipse SmartHome support discovery, but openHAB 1 requires you to manually identify the items you want to monitor and control. So it’s on the way!