While I agree with the author that feature branches are useful, I think he went too strongly the other way, against feature toggles. Feature toggles allow you

While I agree with the author that feature branches are useful, I think he went too strongly the other way, against feature toggles. Feature toggles allow you to do things like: 1) deploy only to certain users. 2) incrementally deploy to N percentage of your users. i.e. deploy to 1%, then 10%, then 100%. These are things that absolutely cannot be done by your VCS system. If you're going to use FTs, then yes, they need to be baked in and well supported by your app. A consistent API & tooling are a good idea. FWIW, at CircleCI (https://circleci.com https://circleci.com), we use feature branches all of the time. We automatically CI all branches, and we use feature toggles. In fact, I'm toying with the idea of a feature-toggles-API-as-a-Service.