Environment drift never announces itself. It shows up as a bug that only one person can reproduce, a test that fails only in CI, or a deploy that works everywhere except production.
This one cost three engineer-days across two weeks before someone diffed the Node minor versions between a laptop and the CI runner. The behaviour difference was in a date parsing edge case at month boundaries.
Boring infrastructure is the cheapest thing you'll ever buy — and it never feels urgent until it's too late.
The fix was unglamorous: pin runtimes, lock dependencies, make the container the only supported way to run the app locally, and make it fast enough that people actually use it.
If your laptop and CI disagree, one of them is lying to you daily.
Boring infrastructure is the cheapest thing you will ever buy. It just never feels urgent until the week it's already cost you three days.
