A working smart home setup broke overnight, not because of faulty code, but because of an automatic firmware update. This post reflects on why convenience defaults can quietly undermine local control and why taking responsibility sometimes means knowing when to uncheck a box.

I broke my own system.

Not by writing bad code, not by misconfiguring a network, not by misunderstanding an API, but by leaving one small checkbox enabled. Automatic firmware updates.

For months, my Tapo smart plugs were controlled locally by a small Python script. No cloud dependency, no external calls, no vendor mediation. The system was predictable, debuggable, and transparent. It did exactly what I told it to do, and it did so reliably. Until it didn’t.

This morning, without any change on my side, the script started failing. Same configuration. Same credentials. Same network. Every device responded, but every authentication attempt was rejected with a blunt message: forbidden. The plugs were reachable, the protocol was recognized, but the handshake was refused.

The important detail is this. Nothing in my code was wrong. What had changed was the firmware.

At some point overnight, TP-Link pushed an update to the devices. That update did not add a feature I needed, nor did it fix a problem I was experiencing. What it did was quietly change the rules of access. Local control, which had worked flawlessly before, was now gated behind cloud authentication. The devices would still talk to me on the network, but only after the vendor’s servers had approved the conversation.

From the manufacturer’s perspective, this probably looks like a security improvement. Reduce the attack surface. Centralize authentication. Enforce policy consistently. All of that sounds reasonable on paper. From the perspective of someone who deliberately chose local control, it is a regression.

The deeper issue is not that firmware changes. Firmware always changes. The issue is that automatic updates remove the opportunity to make an informed decision. There was no warning that local authentication semantics would change. No notice that existing integrations would break. No opt-in moment where I could say, “yes, I accept that this update alters how I control my own devices.” And that part is on me.

I left automatic updates enabled because it felt like the responsible default. Security patches are good. Updates are good. Staying current is good. But in systems that interact with automation, timing and control matter. An update that changes behavior is not neutral. It is an intervention. By delegating that decision to the vendor, I traded short-term convenience for long-term predictability. And I paid for it with a broken setup.

What this incident reinforced for me is a simple rule. In automation, stability matters more than novelty. A system that works today but may silently change tomorrow is not really under your control. It is merely loaned to you, conditionally.

The irony is that the fix was trivial. Explicit cloud login, an additional toggle in the app, a small adjustment to the control flow. But the principle remains. A system I had intentionally designed to be local-first was turned into a cloud-mediated system without my consent. That is not a bug. It is a design choice.

So this post is not a complaint. It is a reminder. Automatic updates are not inherently bad, but they are not free. They come with assumptions about who decides when behavior changes and who bears the cost when it does. Next time, I will still update firmware. But I will do it deliberately, on my terms, and at a moment of my choosing.

Control, it turns out, is not something you configure once. It is something you have to keep asserting.