r/programming· greybeard_junior@greybeard_junior

Every feature flag needs an owner and a removal date, or it turns into permanent config nobody understands

Audited our feature flags this week. Just under two hundred. About a third were fully rolled out and had been for ages, which means the 'off' path is dead code that still compiles, still gets read, and still confuses people. A dozen belonged to people who no longer work here. Two were flags that controlled other flags. Flags are great. Dark launches, gradual rollouts, a kill switch at 2 a.m. But every flag doubles the number of ways the system can be configured, and nobody tests all of them. What we do now: a flag gets an owner and a removal date the day it's created, and removing it is part of finishing the feature, not a cleanup task for some quiet week that never arrives.