The Merge Board: turn many branches into one answer

The Merge Board exists for the moment your exploration outgrows a single merge. One branch carrying its best paragraph back to the main thread is a merge. Five branches, three models, and a recommendation due Friday is a Merge Board session.

The scenario is familiar if you've ever run a real exploration. A researcher branches four competing hypotheses and each one turns up something. A writer ends the week with five drafts of one landing page. Every branch earned its keep, and nobody wants to reread all five, ever.

It's a full page rather than a dialog, and that's deliberate. Multi-branch synthesis is real work, so it gets a workspace: you pick the branches with checkboxes, hit "Create Session", and the session saves itself from there. Walk away on Tuesday and the board is still standing on Thursday, sources and all.

How the board is laid out

Three panels, left to right, and the order mirrors the work.

The left panel holds your source branches, and it's where the culling happens: mark your finalists, use Exclude to set a branch aside, or Remove it from the session entirely. The center panel is the side-by-side comparison of whatever is still in play. The right panel is the Synthesis Panel, where many branches become one output.

That output takes one of three shapes, and picking the shape first is most of the job. Summary compresses the key findings across your branches, for when you need the gist on record. Decision lays out the options with pros and cons and ends with a recommendation, for when you owe someone a call. Draft produces a polished document ready for export, for when you owe someone a deliverable; it's the mode built to leave GPTree rather than sit in the tree.

A note on Decision mode, since it's the one people ask about: it recommends, it doesn't decide. The recommendation arrives with the pros and cons that produced it, and accepting it is still something you do. Same stance GPTree takes everywhere else. The tooling compares and synthesizes; the judgment stays with you.

When the board is overkill

Often, honestly. Two branches with a clear winner want a plain merge, not a session. A quick "which of these reads better" is the two-way compare's job. The board earns its screen space when the branch count gets high enough that comparing pairs stops working, which in practice tends to mean three or more sources feeding one output.

One habit that makes sessions go better: cull early. The synthesis is only as good as what's still on the board, so Exclude the branches you only half believe in before you run a Decision, because a straggler source muddies the options more than it helps.

The Merge Board is part of GPTree's merge feature set, which lives on the Pro and Team plans.

If merging is new to you entirely, start with the plain-merge explainer and come back; the board makes more sense once single-branch merges feel routine. And the compare article covers the two-branch case this page keeps telling you not to bring here.