I think(?) you're thinking of "Adaptive Recovery" which has a few manufacturer-specific aliases.

The behavior is broadly as follows: Consider a thermostat heating schedule that is programmed for 64F overnight, increasing to 70F at 7:00am. A regular thermostat would begin heating at 7am, and take e.g. 40 minutes before reaching 70F. So between 7:00 and 7:40 the temperature is "less than 70F."

With adaptive recovery, the thermostat figures out (or is hand-tuned to know) that it will take 40 minutes to raise eight degrees, so begins the schedule at 6:20 so that it hits 70F right at 7am.

If that's not what you were saying then, uh, ignore me.

it's literally smart home automation, just analog. you like the functionality of automation, you just have a fashionable allergy to it in its digital form

Timers are "smart" now? I just though they were timers. Does the timer on my cooker, so I don't need to set an external timer, make my cooker smart too? Is my outside light over my bins "smart" because it's connected to a light and motion sensor and come on automatically at night?

I've definitely no "fashionable allergy" to digital forms of automation. I simply don't want the massive complexity that comes with it.

I'm also not advocating against it, I just don't see the point it in.

Setting schedules and automatically doing things in reaction to events is home automation. You've set it up to do something automatically when needed so you don't have to interact with it. I wouldn't include a timer you have to set manually every time though.

Your thermostat? Yes, based on the image above. The cooker? I'd say not. The lights? Definite yes.

I agree it's an automation, I don't agree with it being "smart".

What I like about my thermostat timer is that it's simple, local, and requires nothing else. No networking, no app, no maintenance over changing the timer for if I'm away, etc.