#deployment

Two costs land the moment you add a flag, and neither is visible that day. It creates a branch in your code that nothing will ever make you delete, and it lets someone change production behavior without passing through any of the safety machinery you built for changing production behavior.

CI/CD is three different ideas people mash into one acronym, and getting the distinction wrong is how teams end up with a pipeline that runs tests but ships nothing. Here is what continuous integration, delivery, and deployment actually mean.