The runbook is the product.

If your AI platform can't be operated by a well-trained on-call engineer at 3am, you don't have a platform. You have a demo.

We judge every system we build by this standard: can someone who didn't write it, keep it running?

## What we mean by runbook

Not documentation. Not a wiki. A stepped procedure, with expected outputs for every step, and an escalation path when the output doesn't match. The runbook is a test of the system, not a description of it.

## Build order

Write the runbook before the system. When the runbook says 'check the queue depth,' you need a way to check the queue depth. When it says 'rotate the signing key,' the rotation needs to be a single command. The runbook forces the shape.