The Future of Version Control

https://bramcohen.com/p/manyana

Manyana

A Coherent Vision for the Future of Version Control

Bram’s Thoughts

Is it a good thing to have merges that never fail? Often a merge failure indicates a semantic conflict, not just "two changes in the same place". You want to be aware of and forced to manually deal with such cases.

I assume the proposed system addresses it somehow but I don't see it in my quick read of this.

Indeed. And plenty of successful merges end up with code that won't compile.

FWIW I've struggled to get AI tools to handle merge conflicts well (especially rebase) for the same underlying reason.

Code not compiling is still the good case, because you’ll notice before deployment. The dangerous cases are when it does compile.

Very true.

I realized recently that I've subconsciously routed-around merge conflicts as much as possible. My process has just subtly altered to make them less likely. To the point of which seeing a 3-way merge feels jarring. It's really only taking on AI tools that bought this to my attention.