It sounds like his approach is similar to the Windows 10 Insider Builds model of Fast Ring & Slow Ring. Even if all the Sublime builds in Dev are stable, I don't want to be updating every 2 days to get some minor bugfix. When I launch Sublime, I mostly just want to get to straight to work, not be thrown out of the zone by an update.

It took me a while to learn that lesson from my own customers. As a developer I'm excited to make sure customers always get new features ASAP, but customers would complain they were perfectly happy with what they'd bought & only wanted an update maybe once or twice a year. But everyone's different - that's why the option of a Dev/Beta channel & a Stable channel is good.

>Most sane projects create a build and test it, and don't rely on testing source code because the build process itself can cause defects as well.

Most indie-dev projects don't do testing, or TDD, or automated build tests at all. It's a guy or 2-3 guys with their XCodes/VSs.

At best, they might have a few tests.

It's different from big companies like FB/Google/etc, or from software like Adobe's, and much different than JS/Java land.