Overview

Stop Reviewing Branches

Despite the hype around git-based workflows like trunk-based development and commit stacking, it's all just fluff. These so-called innovations in branching are nothing more than minor tweaks that hardly move the needle. Git's elaborate structure only adds unnecessary complexity without real benefits. Trunk's emphasis on frequent commits sounds great in theory but crumbles without bulletproof CI/CD and feature flags. Stacking methodologies promise fine-grained control but end up entangling developers in dependency hell. These branching strategies are just variations on a theme that ultimately don’t revolutionize how we build software.

Span Reviews Beyond Code

The future of development isn't about how we manage our branches—it's about how we understand the impact of our changes in real-time. Imagine a development process where plain diff viewing is augmented with insights into how each change affects the state and runtime posture of APIs and services.

Changes

This new approach would integrate advanced observability tools directly into the development workflow, offering immediate feedback on the potential impact of code changes. Instead of merely seeing what lines of code have been added or removed, developers would get a holistic view of how these changes alter the behavior of their application, how they affect performance, security, and compliance, and how they interact with other services and APIs.

By focusing on the real-time impact of changes, this new development process would dramatically reduce the risk of unforeseen issues, streamline debugging, and accelerate the delivery of robust, high-quality software. It’s time to move beyond the superficial tweaks of branching strategies and embrace a future where the true power of our development tools lies in their ability to illuminate the real-world consequences of our code. This is where the needle really moves—by transforming code reviews from a mere formality into a critical analysis of operational impact, driving software that's unbreakable.