Semantic Versioning for APIs and Libraries: Why CI/CD Should Produce Versioned Releases
Ask most teams what their CI/CD pipeline does and you will hear some variation of "it runs the tests and deploys to production." That answer describes deployment automation, and deployment automation is genuinely valuable — but it is only half of what a pipeline should do. The other half is producing releases: repeatable, traceable, versioned units of software that you can point to, reason about, promote, and roll back. For APIs, libraries, and anything else with downstream consumers, the difference between "we deploy" and "we release" is the difference between a pipeline that moves code and a pipeline that communicates intent.