Why Your Config Files Break After Every Upgrade (and How Plain Text Fixes It)

The article argues that plain-text config formats are more resilient than binary or proprietary ones across tool upgrades.

Binary configs are tightly coupled to specific versions, which makes them prone to breakage, migration pain, and hard-to-debug outages.

It recommends auditing config files, identifying non-text formats, and converting them to text-based options like YAML, JSON, TOML, or INI.

Teams should also prevent new binary configs from entering the codebase with guardrails such as git checks or pre-commit hooks.