The team friction With AI assistants, developers write code much faster, leading to a flood of pull requests. Teams using heavy branch-based PR workflows get bogged down. PRs pile up, context switches become exhausting, reviews devolve into perfunctory rubber stamps, and merge conflicts become massive because of the sheer volume of changes sitting in branches. The integration phase becomes the new bottleneck.
The pattern The team shifts to trunk-based development. Instead of queuing large batches of work in branches awaiting async review, developers merge small, incremental changes directly to the main branch multiple times a day. They rely on feature flags to hide unfinished work and fast automated test suites to keep the trunk stable.
Why it works with AI AI allows rapid generation of small, complete functional slices. Merging these continuously prevents the “big bang” integration nightmare and keeps the team’s shared context closely aligned. It matches the fast iteration speed of AI agents, preventing the pipeline from clogging.
Watch-outs Don’t abandon code review—shift its focus. Instead of reviewing individual commits (even post-merge), focus code reviews on the critical parts of the codebase. Review functional blocks or do regular, broader reviews of important components. This absolutely requires excellent automated testing and CI/CD; otherwise, the trunk will constantly break and halt the entire team.
Related Shorter iterations