Claude Code has essentially fixed this perpetual annoyance for me. Doesn't matter if it's a hacked up deploy.sh that mixes sed, envsubst and god knows what or a non-idiomatic Helm chart that was perpetually on my backlog to fix... today I just say "make this do this thing and also fix any bash bugs along the way" and it just does it. Its effectiveness for these thousand-little-cuts type DevOps tasks is underrated IMO.

Now the actual CI/CD/thing-doers tools that all suck... I'm still stuck with those.

I have been using Kubernetes for 7 or 8 years now, and have nearly 100% stayed away from Helm.

Some Kustomize, a little bit of envsubst and we're good to go thank you very much.

I don't understand you.

For very simple deployments, you don't need anything at all. Just write manifests and use `kubectl apply`. You can write `deploy.sh` but it'll be trivial.

If you want templating, there are many options. You can use `sed` for the most simple templating needs. You can use `cpp`, `m4`, `helm` or `kustomize`. I, personally, like `kustomize`, but `helm` probably not the worst template engine out there.

Kustomize is even somewhat included into basic kubernetes tooling, so if you want something "opinionated", it is there for you. It works.

And if you want your Helm to run on certain deploys, and maintain a declarative set of the variables given to charts over time, thinking you can use Helmfile and some custom GitHub Actions… “my dear friend you have built a GitOps.”

(I tend to think this one is acceptable in the beginning, but certainly doesn’t scale.)

Or if your colleagues are "smarter" than you they make it in Clojoure instead, with an EDN-but-with-subroutines config language, so that not only yaml-aware editors are useless, but EDN-aware editors cannot make heads or tails of the macros.

Fun times.

If few lines of scripting is your problem you shouldn't be programming

Use a CD solution like Spinnaker, BunnyShell, or Kargo.