SYS.01 — OUT OF TRUE
A telescope out of alignment ruins the best night. You can have perfect seeing, a dark sky, a steady mount — and still see nothing, because the optics are not collimated. Builds are the same. A flaky test, a drifting dependency, a review that always “looks fine” — none of them stop you today. They stop you on the night it matters.
SYS.02 — ALIGN BEFORE YOU OBSERVE
The cheap habit is to check alignment before every session, not after something looks wrong. In CI terms: the build must be trustworthy enough that a red result is believed immediately, and a green result means something. That trust is the instrument.
SYS.03 — WHAT I KEPT OUT
No “known flaky” tests left unwatched, no skipped checks on the way to a deadline. A build you have learned to ignore is worse than no build at all.