What merging means in GPTree

Merging brings the useful outcome of one path back into a main flow. Sometimes that means picking the better answer. Sometimes it means synthesizing the strongest parts of several outputs, or consolidating a week of exploration into a single continuation point, or into an artifact you can hand to someone.

Without it, branching would just be organized sprawl: six tidy paths and no way to end up with one answer. Merge is where the tree narrows back down. And in GPTree it's a full feature with a real flow, not a fancier name for copy-paste.

How a merge moves content

A merge starts from content you select. Highlight a passage in a reply and "Merge" appears in the tooltip. There's a Merge button on any message, and one in the pane header for when the whole branch has earned its trip back. Three entry points, one idea: merging should be reachable from wherever you happen to be reading when something looks worth keeping. What crosses over is up to you as well: individual messages, the AI's summary of the branch, or both. So when the casual-tone branch finally produces the paragraph your draft was missing, that paragraph specifically is what travels.

Then you choose where it goes. The target can be the parent branch (the everyday case), another branch entirely, an existing document, or a new document created from the merge. That last option matters more than it sounds. Plenty of explorations shouldn't continue as conversation at all; a research branch that settled a question doesn't need more chat, it needs to become the document you'll cite next month.

The strategy decides how the content lands, and there are four. AI-Assisted synthesizes the incoming content with what's already at the target, understanding the context on both sides; it's the recommended choice for most merges, and honestly it's the reason merge is a feature instead of a clipboard. The other three are mechanical, for when you know exactly what should move and don't want a model interpreting it: Replace swaps the message, Append adds to the end, Insert places the content at the branch point.

Nothing lands blind. Preview Merge shows a side-by-side diff of the result (red for removed, green for added) before anything changes, and Confirm Merge is the only step that makes it real. If the preview looks wrong, walk away; nothing has happened yet.

What merge won't decide

GPTree doesn't decide which answer deserves to survive. You choose the content, the target, and the strategy, and you read the preview before confirming. Merge makes consolidation cheap; the judgment stays yours, which is the stance GPTree takes everywhere.

Two boundaries to know about. Merge and the compare diff are Pro and Team features, so on the Free plan branches can diverge but can't come back together. And a merge moves one branch's content into one target; when four or five branches each contributed something and you need one synthesis across all of them, that's a different tool, the Merge Board, covered in the next article.

If you're not yet sure which branch should win in the first place, that's a compare problem, one article back. Compare first, merge once.