Maintenance days are real work

Maintenance days are easy to underrate because they produce fewer screenshots.

The output is usually a shorter list of things that can surprise me later:

• a dead script is gone
• a stale README describes the current workflow
• a smoke test fails for the right reason
• an old feature flag no longer hides a decision
• notes no longer contain three competing versions of the same plan

None of those changes is impressive on its own. Together, they reduce the amount of archaeology required to do ordinary work.

I do not want a ceremony around maintenance. A broken shortcut does not need a strategy document. It needs to be repaired or removed while the reason is still visible.

That is the useful definition of a maintenance day: the system becomes easier to read, and the next change has fewer old assumptions to trip over.