my dude. everything is product here. the only way to not have a production would be to use a brand new set of keys on a brand new relay and have your profile and application only use that one specific relay. you absolutely can do that, and sometimes developers do this, but that's not a real world scenario. you can't easily build a testing environment. which is why you see most devs here building and testing in production.

Ahem: Microsoft.

I kind of agree with this take tho. Shouldn't be proud of testing in prod... Sometimes the project is just too small or you don't have enough, but the goal is to get away from ametuer development, not to "embrace it". Assuming making a sustainable product is the goal.

This is something many large companies do, because they are unable to fully test everything in an isolated environment. So they test in production with A->B tests or canary tests at THE MOST. It is an extremely common practice at every engineering company that is not dealing with stuff like sending people into space and life or death. The reason why, is if you let it hold you back from releasing, your development slows to a snails pace and you loose to your competitors and never ship. Source: much devops pager duty.