Developer Advocate Questions Whether Git Should Follow PRs Into Obsolescence
swyx asks if merge conflicts — consuming 20–40% of code spend — signal Git is legacy infrastructure.
Developer advocate swyx posed a pointed question on X: if AI is already displacing pull requests and code review, should Git itself be next? The post estimates that 20–40% of code spend goes toward managing and resolving merge conflicts, framing the question of whether that overhead is a necessary evil or simply cargo-culting a workflow designed for human-paced collaboration.
The thread attracted replies pointing to CRDTs and operational transforms as alternative concurrency models — approaches that allow simultaneous edits to converge without explicit conflict resolution. The debate sits at the intersection of two pressures reshaping software development: AI coding agents that generate and modify code faster than traditional branching workflows can absorb, and a growing sense that version control primitives built for individual contributors may not map cleanly onto agent-driven, continuous-edit pipelines. No concrete replacement or proposal emerged from the exchange, but the question itself reflects a broader industry reckoning with which parts of the developer toolchain were built for humans and which can survive the transition.