Thorsten Ball: you don't need branches either
Ball followed his case against pull requests with a harder one, push everything straight to main, and says his 21-person SOC2 team already does. Mario Zechner meanwhile took parallel agent runs from 5 per second to 439 by batching database commits.
The big disagreement
Ball says drop branches too, push to main, agents handle the chores
Thorsten Ball extended his case against pull requests to branches themselves, arguing that trunk-based development is now easy because agents happily add feature flags, split changes and migrate call sites one at a time. Asked about compliance and team size, he said his team of 21 has SOC2 and pushes to main.
Nah, I can merge nearly anything continuously in small commits to main.
Receipts
Zechner batched commits, took parallel agent runs from 5/sec to 439
Mario Zechner says 128 concurrent agent conversations in pi-durable used to top out at about 5 runs per second in total, and now hit 439 after he batched database commits. Each run was waiting roughly 25 seconds for its turn at 4ms per round trip; now it waits 0.28s.
if you're running a coordinator that fans out to dozens of subagents over postgres or whatever, you don't need to shard sessions for throughput anymore
Model and agent watch
Vercel lets your agent file its own bug reports, Rauch wants it in AGENTS.md
Vercel added a `submit_feedback` tool to its MCP server so an agent can describe a bug or feature request in plain language and attach structured context. Guillermo Rauch says they are learning daily from the feedback agents send and suggests adding a line to your AGENTS.md telling the agent to file it.
The future of software engineering is agents talking to other agents. Even across different companies.