Trunk-Based Development with Short-Lived Branches

Why Long-Lived Branches Kill Velocity You've seen it. A feature branch that started two weeks ago. It's 47 commits behind main. Three people are waiting on it. The merge conflict is 400 lines. Nobody wants to review it because reviewing 2,000 lines of diff is nobody's idea of a good time. Long-lived branches are where productivity goes to die. And when you add an AI agent to the mix, they get even worse. The agent writes code against the branch state. Main moves on. By the time you merge, half the agent's assumptions are wrong. Trunk-based development fixes this. The rule is simple: branches live for hours, not days. Merge to main early and often. Keep main releasable at all times. Trunk-based development doesn't necessarily mean merging changes straight to main. In my view, it's more about ensuring everything works together to really take advantage of CI. Short-lived branches give us this, as well as the safety net that many developers prefer. Concern about pushing directly to main is