Merge Queue Economics: What Interleaving Really Costs
Merge queues are having a moment. Every CI tool — GitHub, GitLab, Buildkite — now ships one. And the pitch is always the same: stop your main branch from breaking, let bots manage the order, and watch your deployment rate climb. But here's the thing nobody tells you. Interleaving has a price. You pay it in rebase cycles, developer waiting time, and the quiet death of long-lived feature branches. This article is a field guide to that cost. Where the Merge Queue Fits in Your Workflow The Anatomy of a Merge Queue Think of a merge queue as a bouncer for your main branch—it decides who gets in, when, and in what order. Before it exists, developers push to main and pray. After it exists, pushes become a sequence of controlled, tested, and validated steps.