Hard no. Without branches, you cannot have PRs. Without PRs, proposed changes cannot be reviewed before they're committed to the trunk. You're clearly an advocate of CI. Without PRs, you have no opportunity to run CI against proposed changes. If you're left running CI only after changes are committed to the trunk, you're really jeopardizing the stability of the trunk. Feature branches aren't the problem. Feature branches that aren't frequently rebased against the trunk are the problem. Your answer of not using branches is heavy handed and introduces far more problems than it solves.