When you have hundreds of developers you’re going to get millions of lines of code. Thats partly Parkinson’s Law but also we have not fully perfected the three way merge, encouraging devs spread out more than intrinsically necessary in order to avoid tripping over each other.
If you really dig down into why we code the way we do, the “best practices” in software development, about half of them are heavily influenced by merge conflict, if not the primary cause.
If I group like functions together in a large file, then I (probably) won’t conflict with another person doing an unrelated ticket that touches the same file. But if we both add new functions at the bottom of the file, we’ll conflict. As long as one of us does the right thing everything is fine.
