What went wrong at a house that runs on AI, why, and the rule it left behind. Written up after the fix, never live.

1. 07The power came back in a minute. Three things never came back on their own.→A whole-house power cut, three services that started too early and never retried, and the cold-start rule that came out of it.
2. 06The Zigbee radio rebooted every four minutes. A clean flash of the same firmware fixed it.→About 490 restarts in two days, a network change that looked guilty and wasn't, and the order of checks that found the real cause.
3. 05A picture made every TV notification time out at 20 seconds. Without it: 0.2.→Remove it before you resize it. Four icon sizes all failed the same way, and the error message pointed at the wrong limit.
4. 04Leave the porch light on: opening 200 field reports from a house that runs on AI→The 408 is opening more than two hundred field reports about AI agents working on a real house, and the three rules they left behind.
5. 03How Fred answers in 1.66 seconds: the model is the last thing a request reaches→How Fred runs a real house on local models with a 1.66-second median voice turn. Most requests never touch a GPU; the ones that do get a model sized for the job.
6. 02Fred said it dimmed the light. Nothing had changed.→Said is not done. Every reply that claims a change gets checked against what the task actually did.
7. 01The backup that failed for two weeks while its monitor stayed green→Exit 0 is not success. A heartbeat should fire on evidence that the job worked, not on a clean exit.