Understanding how adding new content types in development affects production dataset

Good news! Publishing content with new schema types in your development environment won't break your production Studio at all.

Here's what you need to understand: Sanity's Content Lake is schemaless. The schema you define in your Studio code only controls what the Studio interface displays and validates—it doesn't restrict what can be stored in the dataset itself. As long as your documents have a _type property, they can be saved to the dataset regardless of whether that type is defined in any Studio's schema.

So in your scenario:

1. Development Studio adds new content types and publishes documents → ✅ Works fine, documents are stored in the production dataset
2. Production Studio (with old schema) continues running → ✅ Also works fine, it just doesn't "know" about the new content types yet

The production Studio simply won't display the new content types in its interface because they're not defined in its schema. The documents exist in the dataset, but that Studio can't edit them until you deploy the updated schema to production.

What happens when you deploy the schema changes to production: Once you update your production Studio with the new schema definitions, those documents will immediately become visible and editable in the production Studio interface.

This is actually one of Sanity's powerful features—the schemaless backend means your data isn't locked into rigid database structures. The schema is just a configuration layer for the Studio interface, not a database constraint.

One consideration: If you're using Agent Actions or certain AI features that require sanity schema deploy, those do need the schema to be deployed to work properly. But for basic content creation and Studio functionality, you're completely safe.