Easy deployments are great, and all too rare. But feature flags are good too. It's actually a trade-off between determinism and control. No flags make the blob

Easy deployments are great, and all too rare. But feature flags are good too. It's actually a trade-off between determinism and control. No flags make the blob deterministic; flags give you control over the blob very late in its runtime. In the limit your feature flags might be set by an admin endpoint (which is very common, actually). But the OP's real issue is git, and not wanting to work on a branch. I actually think that's a valid goal! I've noticed that many teams have simply moved "one level up" with their git usage. The repo is the new directory; the push is the new commit; etc. You can practice and get fast with it, but it's still too many moving parts and plenty of things to go wrong. I actually think that feature flags are too coarse anyway to block off incomplete code; you should probably use conditionals for incomplete code, even if you also have robust feature flag support. The reason is that you never, ever want to dynamically turn incomplete code on, so coupling the flag to a deployment makes perfect sense.