Maintenance Mode

The zone nobody talks about but everyone needs. Maintenance Mode covers the human operating system behind the code: managing burnout during long vibe coding sessions, ADHD strategies that actually work for dev workflows, mental health in an always-on industry, and the habits that keep you shipping without falling apart.

Most burnout advice is generic. Take breaks. Go for a walk. Journal. That works for people who can reliably sense when they are tired. If you have ADHD, or if you spend your days reviewing AI-generated output at a pace that leaves your brain running hot, standard recovery frameworks were not built for you. The cognitive load of AI-assisted development is a new kind of fatigue, and the industry is only just starting to name it.

This zone applies the same operational thinking you use on production systems to the system that matters most: you. SRE principles like maintenance windows, personal SLOs, graceful degradation, and incident response runbooks are not just server concepts. They are survival tools for developers who push hard and crash harder.

Expect field notes from a builder who codes with AI daily, runs on ADHD, and has learned the hard way that uptime depends on more than servers. Posts here cover the hyperfocus-crash cycle, energy auditing, decision fatigue management, context-switching costs, and the practical systems that keep the human in the loop running. No wellness platitudes. No productivity theatre. Just the operating manual your brain never shipped with.