The 3am Incident That Followed The Playbook
3:17am. The pager vibrates on the nightstand. Half asleep, hand fumbles for phone. The message is three lines. Pod restart storms. API latency spiking. Customers seeing timeouts.
The engineer's first thought isn't "oh god, what now." It's automatic: "open the runbook."
Muscle memory takes over. Hands pull up a laptop still warm from yesterday. The playbook is right there: decision tree, diagnostic steps, escalation paths. No thinking required. Just follow the checklist.
Twenty-three minutes later, the incident is closed. Every step documented. The postmortem writes itself.
This is what happens when you stop improvising and start automating response.