Live Merge Guard – Confluent Hackathon

Live Merge Guard is a real-time IDE collaboration safety system that detects merge conflicts while developers are typing, not after a git push.

Problem

Merge conflicts are detected too late — after code is pushed or during PR review. Developers waste time resolving conflicts that could have been avoided earlier.

Solution

Live Merge Guard streams live typing events from VS Code to Confluent Kafka. Apache Flink processes these streams in real time to detect overlapping edits. Conflicts are pushed back instantly to developers inside the IDE as warnings or suggestions.

Architecture

• VS Code Extension → streams typing events
• Confluent Kafka → event backbone
• Apache Flink → real-time conflict detection
• WebSocket → live feedback to IDE

Tech Stack

• Confluent Cloud (Kafka, Flink SQL)
• Node.js
• VS Code Extension API
• WebSockets

Status

• End-to-end pipeline working
• Real-time conflict detection demo-ready