git-flow_skill

Overview

This skill codifies senior workflow architecture for modern Git teams, specializing in Trunk-Based Development, Stacked Changes, and 2026-era branching strategies. It helps teams maintain linear, forensic-ready history while maximizing velocity and review throughput. The guidance is pragmatic, focusing on automated gates, short-lived branches, and predictable release separation via feature flags.

How this skill works

The skill inspects and recommends a repository's branching and merge practices, CI gate configuration, and automation hooks. It enforces principles like rebase-first history, short-lived PRs, required CI passes, and stacked-change patterns for decomposing large work. It also suggests enterprise alternatives when trunk-based approaches are unsuitable and prescribes automation for stale branches, auto-merge, and pre-merge checks.

When to use it

• You need sub-10-minute deployment cycles and minimal integration friction.
• Code review bottlenecks are caused by large, monolithic PRs.
• Main branch stability must be guaranteed and auditable.
• You want a repeatable, automated release separation without long-lived feature branches.
• Scaling review throughput across many concurrent contributors.

Best practices

• Prefer rebase and squash to preserve a linear, searchable history.
• Keep branches short-lived — aim for under 48 hours active lifetime.
• Gate all merges with green CI and an explicit review (human or critic agent).
• Decompose large features into stacked changes so reviewers handle 100-line increments.
• Separate deployment from release using feature flags and decouple rollout from merge.
• Automate stale branch cleanup, security scans, linting, and auto-merge when safe.

Example use cases

• Enable trunk-based workflows for a fast-moving product team deploying multiple times per day.
• Introduce stacked-change workflows to a codebase suffering from slow, superficial PR reviews.
• Design branching for a regulated enterprise that needs linear history and traceability.
• Automate repository hygiene: stale branch pruning, pre-merge security scans, and merge-on-green policies.
• Transition a legacy Git Flow project to One-Flow or GitLab Flow where environment complexity requires it.