Thorsten Ball: forget PRs — trunk-based development with agents writing to main
viksit · x · 2026-10-17
Thorsten Ball (AMP) describes how his team abandoned PRs in the agent era and went all-in on trunk-based development:
- Everyone works independently in 'orbs': the agent writes code, runs tests, provides proof, and runs the app end-to-end inside the orb
- Feedback happens by sharing an orb portal URL, tagging colleagues in the orb thread, or splitting changes into small pieces behind feature flags
- Prototypes and features are cheap now: instead of days of back-and-forth, they build, share WIP-in-orb on Slack, ship behind flags, and toggle them off within an hour if someone complains
The core argument: when agents make code cheap, the bottleneck shifts from writing to validating and getting feedback — making the traditional PR review process obsolete.
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