It’s remarkable how much better life is on a development team with this simple rule:

Code is automatically deployed to production when merged.

No more long release coordination threads.
No tedious approval processes.
No manual, repetitive, time-consuming steps.

Just merge.

This one rule fosters many other helpful behaviors:

✅ Get feedback early and often.

✅ Write good tests you can trust.

✅ Use feature flags so you can deploy incomplete features, or roll back if there are issues.

And, if a bug slips into prod, getting a fix in is straightforward:

1. Toggle the buggy new feature off (you used a toggle, right? 😉)
2. Merge a fix. It’ll automatically deploy in a few minutes. 😎

This is why release frequency is an excellent dev team health indicator. If a team releases multiple times a week, they’re likely doing a lot of other things right to enable it.

If releasing is hard, do it more often. </thread>

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