Company
Date Published
Author
Graham McNicoll
Word count
199
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

Feature flags are effective for minimizing deployment risks but can contribute to technical debt if not properly managed, particularly when engineers neglect to remove unused flags. GrowthBook addresses this issue by introducing alerts for "stale" feature flags, defined as those unchanged for two weeks and providing the same value to all users. While this detection system may not be foolproof—since some flags, like those used as kill switches, are intended to be long-lasting—users can easily dismiss irrelevant alerts. GrowthBook is also planning to introduce more features, such as GitHub Code References integration and real-time usage detection, to help manage technical debt more effectively.