A lifecycle for feature flags follows: add, roll out, enable, and cleanup; however, cleanup is frequently skipped, turning flags into permanent scaffolding rather than temporary switches.

Best practices require assigning ownership and a target removal date to each new flag, documenting this in the flag description, and conducting recurring reviews to remove stale flags.

Dormant flags bring cognitive and maintenance costs, including noisy diffs, wasted review time, and unreliable monitoring for code paths that no longer run in production.

Modern flag platforms can detect staleness and surface unused or long-inactive flags; for teams without such tooling, regular inventory scripts can identify candidates for deletion.

During refactors, agent behavior often preserves flag structures, which can increase flag debt as new flags are created using the same pattern.

Flags can persist in code long after rollout, becoming dormant branches that force readers to consider both sides of a condition even when one side is dead.

A practical cleanup approach is to select the oldest completed rollout flag, remove its checks by substituting the final value, run tests, and maintain a regular cleanup cadence (for example, one flag per week) to reduce flag debt.

Ultimately, flags should be treated as temporary scaffolding and removed once the feature is fully rolled out to prevent accumulating complexity and risk.