Cleaning up 122 stale feature flags in one quarter

The feature flag store had 240 flags in it at the start of Q2. As of last week, 118. The cleanup retrospective is below.

How the count grew

A flag-creation policy change two years ago made flags free to create and never asked anyone to remove them. The result was predictable: flags accumulated, and the ones that were left on by default after the experiment ended were the most dangerous.

What changed

Every flag now has an owner, an expected sunset date, and an alert that pages the owner if the flag is still around 90 days after the expected sunset. The change took two engineers four weeks to roll out across the codebase.

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