A field guide to telling feature flags, config values, and user settings apart, three things that look identical at the API boundary and behave nothing alike. Miscategorize them and you end up with 240 'flags', a dashboard nobody trusts, and a 3am page about a setting that should have been a database row.
Read article →deathbyclawd.com isn't wrong, Claude really can one-shot a feature flag service in an afternoon. The problem isn't the first afternoon. It's the next two hundred. A friendly, no-insults case for paying us a small amount of money instead.
Read article →On the web, a flag flip reaches every user in seconds. On mobile, your rollout has to survive review queues, offline devices, persistent on-disk state, and the user who hasn't updated since 2024. A different problem, a different set of patterns.
Read article →Standard percentage rollouts don't translate cleanly to LLM features. Sticky bucketing, shadow evaluation, and capability gating are the three patterns AI engineers actually need, and why your latency, cost, and eval signals all behave differently.
Read article →Progressive rollouts let you ship slowly. Kill switches let you stop instantly. A practical guide to the on-call engineer's most underrated tool, and how to design your code so it actually works at 3am.
Read article →From cowboy push-to-prod to a real flag system, a brutally honest map of how engineering teams actually evolve their release strategy, and how to know which level you should be at.
Read article →Learn how feature flags decouple deployment from release, enabling teams to ship code daily while maintaining stability and control.
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