If you want to tell about yourself, please do. (You can also talk about the amount of coffee you drink to balance)
If I looked at when I used to do customer-facing work. I could get by on four hours a night. Show up with blood shot eyes and bumble through the day without any fear of messing up.
Since my development career has taken off I can't go less than 9 hours of sleep. It seriously impacts my work performance to not have a full night's rest and I will even stop work and go home for a nap (or hit the gym, seems like a 50/50 which will work to pep up the energy) if I start feeling my internal engines roaring down.
I have done some late night commits. I do wake up in the middle of the night with a burning idea. I occassionally stay up to work on a personal project but I can only afford to do that maybe once or twice a month. I do sometimes miss the days of menial service industry work where I could just stay up and binge-watch a show on Netflix, read a novel cover-to-cover, or code through the night on a personal project knowing that being exhausted at work wouldn't ding me on the next review.
That being said, I too, have had some epiphanies at 4 am ... I average around 7-8, I wish I could get a steady 8.5+ but my body just won't budge. Guess I'm stuck with 8 hours :)
I tend to drink about 3-5 cups of coffee per day so not that much. I do avoid coffee after 3pm though.
I should mention that I run 4-5 times a week in the morning.
I work at home, and with 5 hours of sleep I'll literally just fall asleep at my desk.
I need 7-9 hours, and probably average 8.5.
I really wish I only needed 5, though.