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Comment by zabil | Hacker News Reader

Used trunk-based dev a lot. Not a fan. It sounds good on paper, but in practice, it gets messy fast and code quality is hard to maintain, especially when teams are remote.

What actually works is trunk-based deployments — keep main always deployable, and ship from there. Simple.

PRs, are underrated. They’re great for sharing context. You get inline comments, CI runs, you can test stuff in isolation by spinning up infra, and teammates actually see what’s changing.

Stacked diffs make juggling multiple PRs manageable. And yeah, PR reviews can slow you down, but honestly, I think that's a plus. Slowing down just enough to have another human look at the code pays off more often than not.

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I don’t understand why PRs are being discussed here at all – doesn’t anyone serious use trunk based development with code reviews? How is that different from a PR? Seems like we need to disentangle the discussion of whether code review is good from whether feature branches vs trunk based dev are good. Those are completely unrelated questions to me.

I think there are a lot of interesting questions about using feature flags (a baby branch) vs actual branches. Personally I’m pro flags and anti branches, after a lot of experience in developer tools and CI.

Definitely feature flags are the way to go. Having those code paths integrated early doesn't cost much and makes it basically free when you want to "merge" the feature into default.

This does require your software to have a decent architecture such that feature flags aren't littering every part of your codebase, though. Ideally you want something like a whole module/plugin being enabled/disabled right at the entrypoint of your program/module. But this also pays dividends in the long run.

There are different flavours of TBD. Some use short-lived feature branches, some commit directly to master. The article advocates for the latter.

PRs basically have a hard-requirement on branches (or equivalent, like fork), because the code that is being requested to pull needs to be available somewhere. The article also advocates for not using pull requests.

However people who take this position also often advocate for post-merge code review. And more advocate for pair programming or mob programming, which they consider to represent code review as well. So branchless TBD isn’t incompatible with code review, just code review as it is commonly practiced.

I'm pretty sure trunk-based development includes using feature branches and MRs/reviews etc. I didn't get the impression we were always supposed to commit directly to master (although that is possible for trivial things which reduces overhead).

Is everyone talking about the same thing here?

There are different flavours of TBD. Some use short-lived feature branches, some commit directly to master. See:

https://trunkbaseddevelopment.com/

If your team is very small then strictly creating feature branches and pressing the merge button immediately because there's nobody left to review it is silly. I like that it gracefully degenerates into just committing directly to the trunk when it makes sense.

This works with git (or DVCS in general) because your local "master" or whatever is a short lived branch. People seem to forget but with git you are branching every time you clone. Obviously committing broken stuff and WIPs directly to the trunk isn't going to work.

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