The Senior Engineer Who Vibed Through Merge Conflicts

Merge Victim (“MV” from now on) was reviewing Adam’s (name changed) pull request.

Adam was a new hire, with 15+ years of experience in the field, and had previously worked as a tech lead in another startup. Ever since joining this company, Adam had been strongly advocating for AI-assisted coding, and was sharing his AI tips and tricks with the team.

The team was preparing for a new release, so a lot of code was merged at the same time, causing some merge conflicts.

Adam pinged MV, asking for feedback on his pull request. MV noticed some things in the PR that needed to be changed, so he left review comments on GitHub and let Adam know about them.

Adam quickly responded.

Hey, I addressed your feedback, please take another look!

MV noticed something weird was going on.

Some of the previous review comments had disappeared. After looking at the diff view, he noticed that some of the code (that they need to land the PR!) had disappeared.

MV lets Adam know about the missing code. Adam responds.

My bad. I just had some merge conflicts when rebasing. I fixed the issues, PTAL!

No big deal, things happen when a lot of people are merging things at the same time. MV takes another look at the changes. This time, even more code has disappeared.

MV lets Adam know, Adam responds again.

Crap. I had a bad merge from main, but I fixed it now.

So MV takes yet another look. And no, it’s not fixed at all.

Major chunks of the code is missing, making the pull request unmergeable. CI checks pass, but the PR is incomplete without the missing code.

MV let’s Adam know yet again, and Adam is flustered.

What the hell? Alright, I’ll solve the conflicts manually

“Manually? What do you mean manually?”, MV asks.

Adam clarifies:

I was using Claude Code to solve the merge conflicts. I guess I’m holding it wrong.

Well that explains a lot. Sigh.