Bold take. You only need prod. But you also need: • excellent code review • excellent observability • excellent rollback • excellent code ve…

Bold take. You only need prod. But you also need: • excellent code review • excellent observability • excellent rollback • excellent code verification • excellent governance Otherwise you’re replacing staging with hope. And it becomes even more interesting in the age of AI-generated code, where change volume is growing faster than our ability to manually verify it. My spiciest take: 🌶️ You only need prod. Other environments are optional, and may cause more problems than they solve. Imagine prod was our team’s only environment. We’d: - write lots of tests - stop batching work in lower environments - stop rushing to hit arbitrary release cut…

Source: Itamar Friedman (X) | 2026-06-04