I was ready to ship my first real feature.

Editor open. Tasks clear. Momentum high.

Then I stopped, closed that branch idea, and spent the session setting up CI instead.

In the moment, it felt like I was delaying progress. There were no users yet, no incidents, no red alerts. But I had seen the opposite path before: skip CI early, move fast for a week, then slowly lose speed to noisy PRs, inconsistent checks, and “works on my machine” friction.

Not one big disaster. Just constant drag.

So this time I treated CI as infrastructure, not polish.

The day-one baseline I actually shipped

I kept it intentionally small:

one lint job

one test job

same Python/tooling assumptions in local and CI

No matrix builds. No release automation.…