Your Best Engineers Are Tired

What looks like productivity acceleration is quietly erasing the recovery time built into every engineering day. I started noticing it in my engineers first. In one-on-ones. In how the same conversations sounded different toward the end of a sprint. I heard it enough times across enough people that I started looking for it deliberately. Then I noticed it in myself. I'm not coding more than half my hours. My work is reviewing, deciding, evaluating ... across systems, teams, timelines. And I was still running out of steam by Wednesday. We went from running a marathon to sprinting a marathon. Same course. Same distance. But you can't sprint a marathon and finish the same. Recovery Time Was Hidden in the Friction Before AI, engineering had something built into it that nobody named. Recovery time. Not blocked time. Not wasted time. Recovery time. The build step that took four minutes. You'd flip to a browser tab, refill your coffee, let your brain sit in neutral for a moment. Not thinking a