The Optimistic Maintainer: Why Fast Merges Beat Endless Review Cycles

Описание и применение

Оптимистичный подход к слиянию PR в проекте TTT, подкрепленный надёжной автоматической системой тестов, позволил быстро принимать исправления, удерживать активных участников и сохранять компактность основной сборки.

Задача

Maintainers often create friction by over‑reviewing PRs, causing contributor burnout and slow release cycles.

Результат

Optimistic merging, backed by a robust automated safety net, enabled TTT to merge PRs within hours, keep the core binary lean, and grow a vibrant contributor community.

Рабочий процесс

• 1. Ensure a comprehensive automated test suite (3,500+ tests, deterministic UI snapshots, benchmark comparisons, architectural zones).
• 2. Apply the 90% rule: merge PRs that pass CI and cover 90% of the problem, then handle remaining 10% via follow‑up tickets or quick polish commits.
• 3. Defend scope: accept bug fixes and quality code but redirect feature requests that fall outside core into Lua plugins.
• 4. Encode culture in code by generating a contributors.json script that lists code authors and issue reporters, embedding it in the binary for acknowledgment.

Доказательства

If merging a PR requires you to open the editor and manually poke at things to see if it feels right, you will inevitably become a bottleneck.

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Because the machine ruthlessly verifies that the invariants haven't broken, I don't have to spend my mental energy acting like a human compiler.

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Merge the 90%.

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By pushing niche features into plugins, the core binary stays lean (single static Go binary, ~14 MB).

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Every bug reporter and every code author is literally baked into the application they helped build.

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