Resolving merge conflicts is probably one of the least liked activities in software development. And while there are techniques that reduce the complexity of merges — for example, practicing continuous integration in the original sense of merging to a shared mainline at least daily — we're seeing too much effort spent on merges. Long-lived feature branches are one culprit, but AI-assisted coding also has a tendency to increase the size of change sets. Help may come in the form of Mergiraf, a new tool that resolves merge conflicts by looking at the syntax tree rather than treating code as lines of text. As a git merge driver, it can be set up so that git subcommands like merge and cherry-pick automatically use Mergiraf instead of the default heuristics.
