Merge Conflict Discipline

merge-conflict-discipline

The core rule: respect every change up to this point WHILE contributing your own — integrate, never clobber. Blind accept-ours/accept-theirs is almost always wrong; it silently discards someone's intent. Deep thought is required only on LEGIT overlap (both sides touched the same thing for incompatible reasons).

This skill has two halves: resolution (a conflict is here now) and prevention (stop them recurring).

PART A — RESOLUTION (semantic, intent-first)

1. Understand the intent of BOTH sides first. Hardest when you authored neither. Use the 3-way view — ours / theirs / common ANCESTOR (git config merge.conflictstyle zdiff3). Get the why: read the commit message, PR, issue, and author for the other side. "Get more context into why they deleted it" before you re-add it.

2. Clean text merge ≠ correct merge. Git cannot detect a SEMANTIC conflict — when one branch's intent isn't applied to lines the other branch added. A textually clean merge can be logically broken. Resolution always ends by re-running build + the full test suite. "It merged cleanly" is not done.

3. Decision frameworks for legit overlap:

   • They deleted what you meant to change (it's gone in latest): find out WHY it was deleted; confirm retaining it isn't at odds with the platform/north-star direction; then re-add, adapt, or drop your change. Default to the platform direction over local intent.
   • They updated it differently from you: ask the same why; reconcile by INTENT — combine both where compatible; if truly mutually exclusive, pick the one serving the north-star. Then ask the prevention question: why did we collide here at all?
   • Both added independent edits (the classic third case): standard 3-way integrate-both.

4. Feed conflicts back into prevention. A conflict CLASS that recurs is a signal, not bad luck — add a prevention control (below) so it can't recur (regression-ratchet discipline).

PART B — PREVENTION (legit overlap is usually a design/hygiene smell)

If you keep hitting real overlap, ask: are we not using best practices — a consistent formatter? canonical sorting? leaning on open source enough?

• Deterministic formatters, fleet-wide (prettier / gofmt / ruff / black / buildifier / …): canonical layout → minimal diffs → fewer collisions. Enforce as a REQUIRED CI check so every PR arrives pre-canonicalized.
• Canonical / alphabetical sorting of imports, deps, enums, lists, config keys. Combine with one-item-per-line + a magic trailing comma so additions are appends, not line-edits two people fight over.
• Custom merge drivers via .gitattributes for trivial/generated classes (lockfiles: pnpm/poetry/composer, generated code) → auto-resolve the busywork.
• Modular design (SRP, small focused files, "things that change together live together") → fewer same-section edits. Repeated overlap in one file is a structural signal to split it.
• Short-lived branches: small frequent PRs + frequent rebase off main → conflicts stay small and incremental.

DONE means

Build + tests green after resolution (not just "merged clean"); the resolution preserved both intents (or chose the north-star one deliberately, with the why recorded); and if the conflict class recurred, a prevention control was added.

Sources: git-scm gitattributes; semantic-conflict awareness (Fowler); standard merge-prevention practice.