Green CI and Merge Queue Mastery with Trunk’s Eli Schleifer

About this episode

Cory O'Daniel interviews Eli Schleifer about challenges in CI and merge queues as code generation accelerates.

When a flaky test can stall a merge queue, “just rerun CI” stops scaling fast. Cory talks with Trunk co-founder and CEO Eli Schleifer about the outer loop problems that show up as teams ship more code - especially with AI-assisted development increasing PR volume. They break down what a merge queue is, why logical merge conflicts happen even when individual PRs are green, and how predictive testing helps protect main without forcing constant retesting. Eli also explains how Trunk approaches flaky tests: collecting JUnit results, using quarantines so known flakes don’t block delivery, and fingerprinting failures to tell the difference between “this always times out” and “this was just broken by a recent change.” The conversation closes on how review and quality practices may shift as code generation accelerates - and what still needs strong guardrails like tests, security checks, and reliable CI signals. Guest: Eli Schleifer , co-founder and CEO of Trunk Eli Schleifer leads Trunk’s technical vision and product strategy, focused on closing the gap between AI-speed code generation and human-speed delivery by removing the bottlenecks that slow modern engineering teams. Trunk’s…

People in this episode

Host: Cory O'Daniel

Guest: Eli Schleifer

Topics covered

• Continuous Integration
• Merge Queue
• Flaky Tests
• AI-assisted Development
• Software Engineering
• Code Quality

Keywords

• CI
• merge queue
• flaky tests
• predictive testing
• code generation
• software delivery

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Trunk, Google, YouTube, Uber, Microsoft

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