Trunk-Based Development With Coding Agents: What Replaces Code Review?
TL;DR: Trunk-Based Development With Coding Agents On August 13th, Amp's Will Dollman explained why Amp's trunk-based development, with engineers pushing straight to main and no pull requests, still fits SOC 2 . The controls: restricted push access, signed commits, CI that blocks bad changes, and commits that link to the agent thread that wrote them. On October 13th, at Paradigm Frontiers 2026,…
In trunk-based development with coding agents, the concept of code review evolves and becomes more distributed across various stages of the development process. While the traditional pull request model is eliminated, review still plays a crucial role in ensuring code quality and adherence to standards. Here's how review is integrated into this workflow:
1. **Before Push:** Engineering agents are asked to provide irrefutable proof that the code works before it is pushed to the main branch. This can include demo videos, test matrices, and logs from the agent's own cloud machine. The goal is to ensure that the change is functional and reliable before integration. This stage answers whether the code works independently of any external context.
2. **CI Gate:** Continuous Integration (CI) tests, infrastructure checks, and security scans are run on every change. If the change fails any of these tests, it is blocked from being merged to the main branch. This step ensures that only changes that meet predefined quality criteria can progress further.
3. **Trace Back to Agent Thread:** The history of each commit is linked to the Amp thread that wrote them. This traceability allows auditors and reviewers to follow the development process, ensuring accountability and transparency.
4. **Rollout After Deploy:** After deployment, the rollout process is monitored to ensure that the change behaves as expected in the production environment. This step verifies that the code performs correctly under real-world conditions.
5. **Owners for Load-Bearing Code:** For critical code paths, designated owners are responsible for reviewing and approving changes. This step ensures that changes to essential parts of the system are still subject to expert review, maintaining the same level of oversight as in traditional pull request workflows.
In essence, while the pull request model is replaced, the core principles of review remain intact. Review is simply distributed across more stages of development, ensuring a multi-layered approach to quality assurance.
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