Sleep Is Infrastructure
The brain has uptime requirements.
[ essay ]
Sleep is infrastructure — the scheduled maintenance window your cognition depends on, not a personal luxury.
I traced a quiet regression in our review quality last spring and expected a linter or a flaky test. Instead I found a squad averaging five hours a night for a month, proud of it, shipping weekly anyway. Decisions made on that substrate are not the decisions the same people would make rested — and the degradation is invisible from inside the tired brain doing the deciding. Skipping sleep is an unplanned outage you chose and then pretending the uptime metrics still mean something.
They treat rest as individual hygiene because it does not appear on the sprint board. But the system above the maintenance window is the only one you have.
Schedule sleep the way you schedule deploy freezes: non-negotiable windows where the team is not expected to perform heroics.
Protect the window before you protect the velocity chart. No heroics without recovery is an SLO, not a slogan.
— JV · Dark Heart Labs.