> How many developers here are aware that this is a bad pattern?

I've been around the block and I think dev/staging/prod is a great pattern! Anyone telling otherwise may be cargo-culting hyperscalers who:

1. Can't replicate their prod environment without spending tens/hundreds of billions in capex

2. Have spent an aggregate of billions investing in developing tools, processes, core-infrastructure teams, and specialized SREs to monitor and keep prod healthy.

2.1 Have tools supporting gated release to a fraction of their users with automated anomaly detection. FANGs can easily test changes against 0.01% of their userbase and get meaningful data back.

If you're not constrained by (1) and don't have the benefits of (2), dev/test/prod is an excellent strategy you should use instead of testing in production for no reason.

I have seen tiny teams fail to replicate their single-host prod environment in dev and test.

I have seen tiny teams with 3 release branches cause outage after outage of their tiny SaaS product as they couldn't keep track of what changes they merged where.

I have seen days of downtime when nobody could re-create their old-ass environments that nobody ever documented or updated, their code dependent on systems that didn't even have an active repository anymore.

I have seen C-beams glitter in the dark by the tanhauser gate.

All these moments, lost in time, like ssh keystrokes in a container.