Takes an approved change the rest of the way - merges it and pushes it live to production. Its job is the deploy itself, distinct from preparing the change and opening a PR, from watching how the release behaves afterward, and from guarding against destructive commands.
Situations it fits
Everything is reviewed and you just want to get this into production now - merge it and deploy it to users.
Land and Deploy. All four live around a release, which is the trap. land-and-deploy is the deploy itself - merging the approved change and pushing it live to production. By contrast ship runs the pre-merge pipeline - tests, diff review, version and changelog - and stops at the opened PR; canary watches a release AFTER it ships, comparing the new version's health to the old and rolling back a bad one; careful guards a single destructive command - a force-push, a recursive delete, a dropped table - by confirming before it runs.
The PR is approved and green. Now you want it merged and pushed live to production in one move - the actual release to users, not the prep work that led here.
Land and Deploy. All four live around a release, which is the trap. land-and-deploy is the deploy itself - merging the approved change and pushing it live to production. By contrast ship runs the pre-merge pipeline - tests, diff review, version and changelog - and stops at the opened PR; canary watches a release AFTER it ships, comparing the new version's health to the old and rolling back a bad one; careful guards a single destructive command - a force-push, a recursive delete, a dropped table - by confirming before it runs.
3 scenarios in the bank answer to Land and Deploy. The rest are in the game.
Skills it gets confused with
These share a family with Land and Deploy, which is another way of saying they are the ones you might reach for by mistake.