Branches should be small enough and short lived enough that they are atomic commits. Merge early, merge often, don't break things. Work on small pieces that don't change functionality, The missing part of this is that this causes you to need merge-trains earlier - You'll want to start "stacked" commits that are based on the pieces that are atomic but not merged. That sucks, because the tooling isn't yet great at handling that - It should be possible to mark and auto-rebase all your local branches in that dependency chain,