Comment by cirego

You bring up an interesting question -- I think Tilt works best for those that find themselves in an environment where product is delivered using a service-oriented architecture deployed to Kubernetes. It's also easy to get started within a small team in a big company.

To your other point, Tilt is to development as ArgoCD is to deployment. Tilt enables on-demand, reproducible development environments that are sufficiently high-fidelity that you can often replace your shared and/or long-lived testing clusters.

With Tilt, I test my application using the same Kubernetes specs / Kustomizations / Helm Charts that you use to deploy into production. When it comes time to deploy my application, I supply these same specs / kustomizations / charts to ArgoCD.

Because I can reuse the specs for both testing and production, I enjoy far greater testability of my application, improving quality and time to market.