| name | resolve-conflicts |
| description | Resolves git merge conflicts without dropping functionality from either side. Merge is the main flow; rebase covered briefly. Activates when: merging branches, resolving conflicts, updating a branch, integrating work, or when user mentions: merge conflict, resolve conflicts, rebase conflict, integrate branch, update branch. |
| argument-hint | [optional: branch to merge, e.g. main] |
Resolve Merge Conflicts Without Losing Functionality
The goal is not just to make the conflict markers go away — it is to produce code that preserves every behavior from both sides of the merge. Markers gone is not the same as resolved: a clean textual merge can still carry a semantic conflict, where the code compiles but one side's behaviour was silently dropped. A naive resolution that picks one side is the classic way to ship one.
When to Use This Skill
- User asks to merge the base branch (e.g.
main) into the current branch
- User asks to update/sync a branch with the base branch
- Git reports
CONFLICT during merge, rebase, or cherry-pick
- User mentions: merge conflict, resolve conflicts, rebase conflict, integrate branch, update branch
Core Principle
Every conflict is a collision between two intentions, and a good resolution preserves both intents. Reason from the three-way merge base (ours / theirs / common ancestor) to recover what each side meant to change. Before resolving, understand both intentions:
- HEAD (your branch) usually contains a focused change — a refactor, feature, or fix.
- The other branch (the base branch you are merging in) contains unrelated work that has landed since you branched — new features, bug fixes, type migrations, schema changes.
A good resolution keeps the intent of both: apply HEAD's refactor/pattern to the new code that landed on the other branch.
Workflow
Phase 0: Detect Conflicts Before Merging (No Side Effects)
Before starting a real merge, find out whether there will be conflicts and which files — without touching the working tree. This lets you tell the user what they're in for, and lets other skills gate on it.
Local — git merge-tree (preferred). Performs the merge in-memory and writes nothing to the working tree or index:
git fetch origin <base-branch>
git merge-tree --write-tree --name-only HEAD origin/<base-branch>
- Exit 0 — clean merge. The first output line is the resulting tree OID; nothing to resolve.
- Exit 1 — either conflicts or a usage error; they share the same exit code, so distinguish by stdout:
- Conflicts write the resulting tree OID, then the conflicted file paths, then conflict messages, all to stdout (stderr stays empty). These are exactly the files Phase 2 must reason about.
- A real error (bad/unknown ref, unrelated histories) writes nothing to stdout and a
merge-tree: <ref> - not something we can merge line to stderr. Read it and fix the ref — do not mistake it for a conflict.
- In short: exit 1 with non-empty stdout = conflicts; exit 1 with empty stdout = error on stderr.
- Do not combine
--quiet with --name-only — git rejects it with exit 128 (options '--quiet' and '--name-only' cannot be used together).
This needs Git ≥ 2.38. On older Git, fall back to a throwaway probe in a temp worktree (git worktree add), never in the user's live working tree.
Remote — GitHub API (when you only have the PR, not a checkout). GraphQL exposes a computed mergeability flag:
gh api graphql -F owner='{owner}' -F repo='{repo}' -F number=<NUMBER> -f query='
query ($owner: String!, $repo: String!, $number: Int!) {
repository(owner: $owner, name: $repo) {
pullRequest(number: $number) { mergeable mergeStateStatus }
}
}' --jq '.data.repository.pullRequest'
mergeable: MERGEABLE / CONFLICTING / UNKNOWN.UNKNOWN is not "no conflicts" — GitHub computes mergeability asynchronously and returns UNKNOWN until the background job finishes. Re-query after a few seconds; do not treat it as clean.mergeStateStatus (DIRTY = conflicts, BEHIND, CLEAN, …) adds detail but does not name the conflicted files. For file-level detail you still need the local git merge-tree check.
Use the API check for a quick yes/no when working off a PR number; use git merge-tree whenever you have the branches locally, since it also names the files.
Phase 1: Start the Merge
git fetch origin <base-branch>
git merge origin/<base-branch>
If conflicts appear, git status will list them under "Unmerged paths". Do not abort unless the user asks.
Phase 2: Understand Each Conflict
For every conflicted file, before editing:
- Read the conflicted file to see the
<<<<<<< / ======= / >>>>>>> markers.
- Find out what each side did — do NOT assume:
git log HEAD --oneline -10 -- <file>
git log origin/<base-branch> --oneline -10 -- <file>
- If a commit on either side looks load-bearing, inspect it:
git show <sha> -- <file>
- Check for related files — a conflict in one file often correlates with a non-conflicting auto-merged change in a sibling file (a related class, config, or type definition). Read those too:
git show origin/<base-branch>:<related-file> | head -80
Do not resolve a conflict you don't understand. If the purpose of either side is unclear after reading the commits, ask the user.
Phase 3: Resolve Each Conflict
Pick the strategy that preserves both intents:
| Situation | Strategy |
|---|
| HEAD refactored X, base branch added a new field to X | Keep HEAD's refactored style, extend it to cover the new field |
| HEAD and the base branch both fixed the same bug differently | Ask the user — do not guess |
| HEAD added feature A, the base branch added feature B to the same spot | Keep both; place them in the order they appear on each side |
| One side is strictly a superset of the other (e.g. the base branch has everything HEAD has + more) | Take the superset |
| Conflict is a pure formatting/whitespace disagreement | Match project convention |
Beware different accessor/API patterns for the same value. If the two sides reach the same value through different APIs or accessor patterns (raw access vs typed accessors, one helper vs another), the two forms may not be drop-in equivalents — they can differ for some inputs (null handling, type coercion, throw-vs-return on bad input). Do not silently substitute one form for the other. Verify the behaviour first — write a quick test or probe it in a REPL — and if they genuinely differ, either keep the original form or flag the change explicitly.
Phase 4: Verify Nothing Was Dropped (Critical)
The gate: markers gone is not resolved — did the result preserve both intents? This is where the semantic conflict gets caught. After resolving every conflict, diff the resolved working tree against both sides. These forms compare the working tree (not HEAD, which is still the pre-merge commit until you commit in Phase 6):
git diff origin/<base-branch> -- <file>
git diff ORIG_HEAD -- <file>
If you prefer to verify after committing (Phase 6), use commit-vs-commit forms instead: git diff origin/<base-branch>..HEAD -- <file> and git diff ORIG_HEAD..HEAD -- <file>. Do not mix the two — git diff origin/<base-branch> HEAD -- <file> before commit compares two commits and ignores your working-tree resolution entirely.
Read each diff carefully. For every removed line, ask: is this removal intentional? If a field, branch of logic, feature flag gate, or side-effect disappeared, it needs to be restored.
Common things that silently vanish during conflict resolution:
- New fields set on a model/object
- Feature-flag-gated blocks of code
- New validation rules
- New imports (leading to undefined symbol errors later)
- Subtly different accessor patterns that are not interchangeable when the value can be
null — see the warning in Phase 3
Phase 5: Run Quality Checks on Resolved Files
Delegate to the project's quality-check skills rather than invoking the tools by hand. Pick based on which files the merge actually touched:
| Files changed | Skill to invoke |
|---|
| Backend files | backend-quality |
| Frontend files | frontend-quality |
| Both | Both, in parallel |
Both skills already scope checks to the touched files first and keep the slower, full-suite gates for completion-level runs — which matches this phase.
In addition to what those skills cover, also run targeted feature tests for any endpoint, job, or action the merged files participate in (not just the unit tests on the resolved class itself — a merge can break integration points that unit tests miss).
Fix any failures before committing.
Phase 6: Commit the Merge
git add <resolved-files>
git status
git commit --no-edit
Use --no-edit to keep the default merge-commit message. Do not amend or squash a merge commit unless the user asks.
Phase 7: Report
Report back with:
- Which conflicts were resolved and the strategy used for each
- Which features/fields/branches from the base branch were preserved (name them explicitly)
- Any semantic differences introduced (e.g. stricter input parsing) and why they are safe
- Verification results: quality checks pass, N tests passed
- The merge commit SHA
- Whether the branch was pushed (default: not pushed — let the user decide)
Anti-patterns to Avoid
- Accepting one side wholesale without checking what the other side did.
git checkout --ours / --theirs is almost always wrong.
- Resolving conflicts in the editor without running
git diff origin/<base-branch> afterwards. The markers going away doesn't mean the merge is correct — that's exactly how a semantic conflict slips through.
- Copy-pasting the base branch's code with stale imports or deprecated method calls that no longer exist after a refactor on HEAD.
- Skipping the quality checks because "it was just a merge". A merge is a code change.
- Pushing immediately after resolving — let the user review the merge commit first.
- Using
git merge --abort to escape a hard conflict without asking. Discarding the merge loses the partial resolution work the user may want to keep.
Auxiliary: Rebase Conflicts
The workflow above is written for git merge. Rebase conflicts share most of the same reasoning (understand both sides, diff before committing, run quality checks) but the mechanics differ:
- Conflicts are resolved per replayed commit, not all at once.
- Continue each step with
git rebase --continue, not git commit --no-edit.
ORIG_HEAD is set to the pre-rebase tip and remains stable across the rebase, so the Phase 4 diff forms still work.- Never force-push a rebased shared branch without explicit user approval.
If the rebase is non-trivial (multiple conflicting commits, or a long-running branch), consider aborting with git rebase --abort and doing a merge instead — merges are usually easier to review and revert.
