The report was short: dusk came, the porch and garage lights stayed dark.

My first instinct was the clock. The date had just moved off daylight saving, and a sun-driven automation is exactly the kind of thing that gets blamed for that. Half the internet agrees with that instinct. Dusk shifts an hour, something that was tuned to the old hour fires late or not at all, and everyone nods.

My front porch lights run on a timer. An automation turns them off every night - and for the longest time, that mostly worked. Then one night I noticed them on when they shouldn’t have been. At 1 AM I was walking past the window and the porch was still glowing, so I turned the lights off myself and promised to look into it the next day.

Looking back at the logs, the story was clearer than I expected: at the usual cutoff the lights turned off, exactly as programmed. Then, a few seconds later, they all turned back on. And they stayed that way until I turned them off.