It’s past midnight and I’m staring at another failed build notification, the red X mocking me from my phone screen like some digital scarlet letter. CI/CD, they said. It’ll change everything, they said.

And they were right, I guess… but not in the way I thought back when I was manually FTPing files to production servers and crossing my fingers that the database schema updates wouldn’t break everything. Those were simpler times, weren’t they? Just you, your code, and the terrifying rush of hitting deploy on a Friday afternoon because you were young and stupid and thought you were invincible.

Now everything’s automated and that should feel good, should feel safe, but sometimes I miss the weight of those decisions. The ceremony of it all. You had to really commit back then – every deployment was a whole thing, complete with backup plans and rollback scripts written on sticky notes that you’d inevitably lose.

These days the pipeline runs every time someone pushes to main and most of the time it works beautifully, catching bugs I would have missed, running tests I forgot I even wrote, spinning up containers in environments I barely understand. It’s magic, really. Pure magic wrapped in YAML files and Docker images and Kubernetes clusters that cost more per month than my first car.

But there’s something unsettling about watching machines make decisions that used to keep me up at night. The green checkmarks flash by so fast now – build successful, tests passed, deployed to staging, deployed to production – and I can’t shake the feeling that I’m missing something important in all that automation.

Maybe it’s just nostalgia for pain, you know? Like how people romanticize vinyl records when Spotify sounds perfectly fine…