[gocartStatue]

Does it have to be post-coding, pre-merge code review?

The difference lies in size of the diff and the manner of introducing changes. Other developers have your changes instantly. This is core of the discipline called „continuous integration”.

I’ve been in multiple teams doing mandatory, pre-merge, double code reviews and getting crappy results. The longer someone kept their precious feature branch isolated, the worse.

And keeping branches „up to date” only solves a small part of the problem with long lived branches.

[JimmieMcnulty]

Yeah, but nobody here is suggesting long lived branches, nothing about a feature branch requires that it exist for a “long time”. Your local “main” branch that you’re developing a feature against is a “feature branch” you just aren’t calling it that.

But even if it did, regularly remerging main back into it (or rebasing) does solve like 90% of the issues being described here, and further comes with a whole host of other benefits.