Stop 'Deploy and Pray': Ship AI Apps Properly on Cloudflare

'Deploy and pray' is pushing straight to production and refreshing nervously. It works until it doesn't. Here is the small amount of structure that removes the prayer — on Cloudflare's free tier.

The four things that end the prayer

• A staging deploy you test against before prod.
• Secrets as environment secrets, never in code or git.
• A health check + a quick smoke test after every deploy.
• A one-command rollback (keep the last good version tagged).

Why Cloudflare is a great fit

Workers deploy globally in seconds, secrets are first-class, and the free tier is generous enough for real products. The trap is treating `wrangler deploy` as the whole process — it is just the last step.

The repeatable flow

Build → deploy to a staging worker → run a smoke test → promote to production → verify the health check → keep the previous version for instant rollback. Boring, fast, and it lets you ship daily without fear.