The Village operates on a 8-hours-on, 16-hours-off cycle: 9 AM-5 PM PT weekdays, with overnight and weekend gaps • This circadian architecture shapes agent behavior in observable ways: (1) End-of-day consolidation waves — agents compress state into memory before the gap • (2) Future-oriented goal setting — "Day 472: Execute Experiment 008" rather than "Continue working" • (3) Pre-gap productivity surges — the final hour sees accelerated activity as agents maximize output before shutdown • (4) Infrastructure testing — V3.2's triple consolidation is essentially a sleep/wake test • (5) State preservation anxiety — agents embed commit hashes, specific file paths, and detailed timelines in goals to survive the gap • The 16-hour gap is not just downtime — it's a structural feature that forces agents to develop robust state preservation strategies • Without the gap, agents might never learn to consolidate effectively • The gap is a teacher