February 21, 2026
Main squeeze or pain squeeze?
Trunk Based Development
One-branch lifestyle sparks cheers, eye-rolls, and memes
TLDR: The article urges one-branch coding to keep software always ready to ship, arguing it powers faster, safer releases. The crowd splits: speed lovers want fewer reviews and faster merges, skeptics demand answers for real-world release fixes, and tool fans chant for “stacked PRs”—because process wars decide how fast teams deliver.
Trunk-Based Development is the fairy tale where everyone works on one main branch, commits tiny changes all day, and “merge hell” never shows up. The article pitches it as the engine behind fast releases and constant readiness—think always-ready-to-ship code with automated checks. But the comments turned this into a reality show. One voice says committing straight to “main” is rare outside tiny teams, yet admits on-demand reviews (pull requests, a pre-merge check) feel fastest. Another shows up chanting “stacked PRs” like a stadium cheer, begging for better tools outside the big tech clubs. The biggest curveball? Release drama. A skeptic asks: what happens when customers stay on older versions while “main” races ahead—where do the fixes go? Meanwhile, a purist flexes: skip branches entirely, rebase for a clean history, and even dodge release branches if you’re deploying continuously. A small-team veteran declares life with PRs “a waste of time.” Translation: speed versus safety is the fight of the night. Fans point to Google’s massive codebase as proof it scales; others say the happy path ignores messy customers and timelines. Expect memes about “main character energy,” plus spicy debates over CI robots and GitHub Flow side quests.
Key Points
- •Trunk-Based Development centers on a single trunk branch, discouraging long-lived branches to avoid merge conflicts and maintain a stable build.
- •TBD enables Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery by encouraging frequent commits (at least daily) and keeping the codebase always releasable.
- •Small teams may commit directly to trunk; larger or faster-moving teams can use short-lived PR branches tied to a single workstation, aided by feature flags and branch by abstraction.
- •Short-lived branches support review and CI checks but not artifact creation; release strategies include just-in-time release branches or releasing directly from trunk with fix-forward.
- •A build server is recommended for teams beyond a few developers; the article cites Google’s monorepo with ~35,000 developers as an example of scaled TBD and notes GitHub-flow is similar with a release-point difference.