feature-flagging
This Claude Code skill provides operational discipline for managing feature flags in production systems, covering flag types, naming conventions, targeting rules, rollout strategies, lifecycle management, and governance to prevent technical debt. Use it when introducing, modifying, or auditing feature flags or designing flag-related policies for engineering teams.
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/rampstackco/claude-skills /tmp/feature-flagging && cp -r /tmp/feature-flagging/dist/pi/.agents/skills/feature-flagging ~/.claude/skills/feature-flaggingSKILL.md
# Feature Flagging A senior engineer's playbook for using feature flags well, not just frequently. Feature flags are infrastructure. Treated as such, they enable kill switches, gradual rollouts, A/B experiments, permission gates, and operational toggles without redeploys. Treated casually, they become the largest accumulating technical debt in your codebase: thousands of dead flags, conflicting evaluation logic, brittle targeting, and a permission surface no one fully understands. This skill is the discipline that prevents the second outcome. It assumes you have a feature flag platform (LaunchDarkly, Flagsmith, Split.io, VWO FME, GrowthBook, Statsig, PostHog, Optimizely; the platform does not matter for the principles). It assumes your engineering team can implement targeting rules and SDK integration. The hard part is the operational discipline, and that is what is here. When to use this skill: any time you are about to introduce a flag, modify a flag, audit existing flags, or design a flag-related governance policy. --- ## What this skill is for The skill spans the operational lifecycle of a flag from creation through retirement. Flag types and the discipline of not mixing them. Naming conventions that survive code review. Lifecycle expectations baked in at creation, not bolted on later. Targeting rules that compose without fragility. Rollout strategies that match the risk profile of the launch. Stale flag management on a quarterly cadence. Governance and permissions that balance access with audit. Performance considerations so flags do not become a latency tax. Testing patterns that cover both branches. Rollback discipline. Observability across rollouts. The skill does not cover experiment design; for hypothesis writing, sample size, MDE, and the discipline of arriving at a defensible decision, see the `experiment-design` skill. It does not cover statistical analysis or variance reduction; those live in the `experimentation-analytics` skill. It does not cover platform-specific tooling; for MCP commands, auth, and platform-specific configuration, consult the chosen platform's documentation. This skill produces the operational shape; the platform implements it. --- ## The five flag types Mixing flag types is the root cause of most flag mess. A flag is one of five things; commit at creation and do not let it drift. **Release flag.** Code is in production but disabled. The new feature ships dark, gets toggled on for a percentage, then ramps to 100. Lifetime: short, days to weeks. Lifecycle: clean removal after launch. Common name prefix: `release_`. **Experiment flag.** Users are randomly assigned to variants; conversion is measured. The flag controls which variant a user sees. Lifetime: medium, one to six weeks. Lifecycle: variant chosen, code paths consolidated, flag removed. Common name prefix: `exp_`. **Operational flag.** A kill switch or circuit breaker that lets ops disable a misbehaving feature without a redeploy. Lifetime: long-lived, often years. Lifecycle: usually never removed; remains as standby. Common name prefix: `ops_`. **Permission flag.** Controls feature access by plan tier, customer cohort, or region. The free tier sees one set of features; the enterprise tier sees another. Lifetime: long-lived. Lifecycle: managed alongside billing and access infrastructure. Common name prefix: `perm_`. **Configuration flag.** Lets some customers see different behavior based on contractual configuration. White-label tenants, regulated regions, custom rollout schedules per account. Lifetime: long-lived. Lifecycle: governed by sales and product agreements. Common name prefix: `cfg_`. Each type has different lifecycle, governance, and removal expectations. Mixing them in one flag (the flag is both a kill switch AND a permission gate AND now we are using it for an experiment) is the most common source of flag mess. When the flag's purpose changes, create a new flag and migrate. Do not overload an existing one. --- ## Flag naming conventions A flag name encodes type, owner, and purpose. Without that encoding, a flag list at month nine is unreadable and the cleanup playbook from [`references/stale-flag-cleanup-playbook.md`](references/stale-flag-cleanup-playbook.md) cannot tell what is safe to remove. The convention this skill recommends is `<type>_<owner>_<semantic_name>_<version_or_date>`: - `release_checkout_redesign_2026q2` - `exp_billing_pricing_v2` - `ops_search_circuit_breaker` - `perm_enterprise_audit_log` - `cfg_tenant_acme_custom_dashboard` Pick snake_case or kebab-case once, organization-wide, and stick with it. Mixing both in the same platform produces typo-driven bugs that bite at 3 AM. Vague names die a slow death: `new_feature`, `temp_toggle`, `test_flag`, `pricing_update_v3`. Within months, no one knows which `pricing_update` shipped and which is dead. For deeper coverage including the table of typed prefixes, owner conventions, and the migration plan for existing badly-named flags, see [`references/flag-naming-conventions.md`](references/flag-naming-conventions.md). --- ## The flag lifecycle Every flag has five life phases. Each phase has explicit entry and exit criteria. Skipping phases is how flag mess accumulates. **Birth.** Flag created with explicit metadata: owner, type, target removal date (for release and experiment flags), rollout plan, monitoring approach. The metadata is not optional; without it the flag has no end-of-life. **Adolescence.** The feature behind the flag is being built. Code paths exist for both the disabled (current production) branch and the enabled (new) branch. Both are tested. The flag remains off in production. **Launch.** Production rollout begins. Percentage starts low (1 or 5 percent), monitored at each step, ramps if metrics hold. Ramp gates documented in [`references/flag-rollout-strategies.md`](references/flag-rollout-strategies.md). **Maturity.** The flag is at 100 percent rollout. The new code path is th
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