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Counterpoint: well-designed feature flags encourage good design and modularity. Rather than sneaking my hacks all over the codebase, if I’m going to sneak a non-backwards compatible change somewhere, I’ll need to explicitly put it behind my feature flag, and it’s immediately apparent not only to reviewers but also future maintainers that my feature is the one that changed behavior. It’s also documentation: this is why this change is necessary. And removing a flag, even when the feature is stable, removes those guardrails.


Counter counterpoint: Chrome also has an entire system for gating features behind flags without needing to write a new command line flag for each one.

Counter counter counterpoint: I like command line flags and you can take them from my cold dead hands.


If it doesn't hail from the command line flag region of France, can it really be called a feature, or is it just sparkling technical debt?




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