Pilum: From Launch to Production-Ready in 3 Months

Github URL: https://github.com/SID-Technologies/Pilum In December 2025, I open-sourced Pilum , a multi-cloud deployment CLI that deploys to Cloud Run, Lambda, Azure, Cloudflare Pages, npm, Homebrew, and Docker Hub from a single pilum.yaml . The announcement post covered the architecture: recipes, ingredients, handlers, wave-based execution. That was the "it compiles and the tests pass" version. Three months and 40+ pull requests later, Pilum deploys all of SID Technologies , platform-core, Torch, Statio, every website, every npm package, and itself. This post is about everything that broke between "it works" and "it ships production software." ( Update: * there's now a seven-months-in addendum at the bottom. It's mostly about what stopped breaking.)* The Timeline Dec 2, 2025 : First commit. Baseline CLI with recipe system. (#1) Dec 4 : Homebrew release workflow. Pilum dogfoods its own deployment. (#2-#4) Dec 31 : Service graph, --only-changed , file embedding support. The "I need this for real" features. (#22-#24) Jan 3-12 : Documentation and bug fixes. The quiet "oh, this doesn't actually work" phase. (#25-#29) Feb 6-7 : The big feature sprint — 8 features in 48 hours. Wave deployments, npm recipe, Cloudflare Pages, Azure Container Apps, Cloud Run Jobs, environment variables, JSON output, history command. (#30-#38) Feb 8-12 : The big fix sprint — YAML parsing, package manager issues, build failures, error swallowing, GCP secrets, Cloudflare execution. Everything from the feature sprint broke something. (#42-#49) Feb 24 : Security hardening and npm publishing fixes. (#51-#53) Mar-Apr : Memory-based worker allocation, wave ordering bug, orchestrator rewrite. The "I thought this was done" phase. (#58-#62) The pattern is clear: features ship fast, fixes ship faster, and the real bugs show up a month later. Wave-Based Deployments Were Broken Wave-based deployment was the headline feature in #31. Services declare dependencies, Pilum builds a dependency graph, topological