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I mentioned in another thread that Alexa had suddenly stopped turning off the lights assigned to the Kitchen group when I say "kitchen off" as she has done properly for years, and instead started responding "It's off" and doing seemingly nothing.
Turns out, what she was doing was turning our heating system off.
We had smart thermostats assigned to Alexa room groups. For all the time we've had it set up, it simply allowed us to say "Raise the heat" or similar, without having to specify which thermostat we meant. But that suddenly broke. So I removed the thermostats from the groups, and now the light commands again work as they always have.
It's little imperfections like that that leave me with no desire to have the locks or the garage door or similar hooked up to these internet systems, but stuff with less consequences, sure, why not. I run a private VPN server, so I can control purely local stuff remotely if I really want to, and I use a purely local video doorbell system, but as long as the consequences of abuse or inadvertent activation low, I'll sometimes use a device that depends on some random Chinese server, if it's cheap and convenient.
And I too consider myself in the IT/sysop/programmer camp.
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