Why I Deleted Every .env File on My Machine

It started at 1am on a Tuesday. I was rotating a Cloudflare API token — routine stuff, the old one was about to expire. I updated the .env in the project I was working on, ran the deploy, everything was fine. Then the staging environment for a different project broke. Same token, different .env , still pointing to the old value. I fixed it. Then a third project broke the next morning. That's when I ran the command that changed everything: $ find ~/dev -name ".env" -not -path "*/node_modules/*" -not -path "*/.git/*" ./boundless-learning/.env ./gitpulse/.env ./gitpulse/api/.env ./noxterm/website/.env ./blindspot/.env ./blindspot/api/.env ./112schade/.env ./bitz-snoek/.env ./playnist/.env ... $ find ~/dev -name ".env" -not -path "*/node_modules/*" -not -path "*/.git/*" | wc -l 47 Forty-seven .env files. On one machine. I sat there staring at the terminal for a full minute. The audit I spent the next hour opening every single one. Here's what I found: The duplicates. My Cloudflare API toke