[!todo] Seed note. A starting point, not a finished note yet.
A toil budget is an explicit ceiling on how much of a team’s time may go to toil, the manual repetitive operational work that keeps a service running. Google’s SRE practice sets it at 50%: at least half of each engineer’s time is protected for project work, much of which reduces future toil. The budget exists because toil expands to fill available time and, unchecked, starves the very engineering that would kill it, so a hard cap forces the trade to be made deliberately rather than by default. Treating toil as a budgeted resource is what turns “we’re too busy to automate” from a permanent excuse into a visible, arguable number. Seeded from Managing Toil.