alt Hacker NewsI've rarely seen the first description of it where people actually commit directly to main. Except in very early stage projects. But it does always feel the fastest if you only review code "on-demand" in PRs/MRs instead of enforcing it for every change.
I think in a team with good ownership, enforcing formal reviews slows down a lot. But of course in a larger code base where no single engineer can understand all the effects a change might have, having a bit of knowledge sharing and 4 eyes enforced is often the better approach than yolo-ing it.
Then again I did build an SQL review tool for database access because I felt like "yolo-ing" production access was also not the way it should be. It's an interesting slider between full autonomy and strict review processes where each team needs to find their sweet spot: https://github.com/kviklet/kviklet/
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In my previous job we worked like this. We had one dev branch that everyone pushed directly to and the dev branch was eventually branched to an RC branch which in turn was merged to master once the release was complete.
The team was small, around 6 people, and the codebase was maybe medium sized (~500k LOC). There was no formal review process, instead it was up to each team member to ensure the quality of their own and others code. In practice I would read through all commits that came in the previous day while having my morning coffee. If there was some egregious I would talk to whoever made to commit to make discuss if something should change, but this was fairly rare.
Formal PR reviews were only ever really used for new members or for bigger/sketchy changes where someone wanted more eyes on it.
Because I ended up reading most commits, I ended up knowing how pretty much the entire codebase worked. It takes a while for this to develop, but the more you do it the better you get at it, especially in the context of a single codebase.
I work in games, and we do commit directly to main. On a smaller team you can get away with pre submit review, post submit checks. On a bigger team you need pre submit checks but honestly the point where you need this is much much later than you think. One of my previous projects had 100+ people committing directly to main with no pre submit checks and jt broke once or twice a day. The builds took longer than that to go through so you just always sync to “last known good”
We're organized in small teams around specific products. That leads to mob programming being a good fit, so code reviews and knowledge sharing is organic. This gives us an opportunity to commit to main and do direct deploys to production. Treating every commit as deployable is key, but it drives good practices.
As I understand it, trunk based development does not call for committing directly to main. It says to avoid long-lived branches for releases, whole features, etc.
There's nothing wrong with small, short-lived branches that can be quickly reviewed and merged into main.
That being said, I've been in a small team where the blessed style was to commit directly to main and do reviews "on demand". It quickly gets features deployed in a way that builds a lot of rot and debt into your project that people quickly lose a good understanding of. Then you just keep piling.
There's probably a way to get this done properly with a tiny team of very experienced and well-aligned developers; but that's usually not what you have in an environment that pushes this kind of extreme no-review-interpretation of trunk-based development.
Slow down, do reviews, avoid keeping branches open for more than a day.