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Not everybody ships every sprint. Some of you ship quarterly, monthly, or when it's done and not a minute sooner. The sprint branch pattern doesn't quite fit that, so you reach for a long-lived release branch instead.

Here's the thing nobody warns you about: a branch is basically a credit card for integration. Every day it stays open, you're borrowing against a merge you haven't done yet. A release branch is the mortgage version — a bigger balance, carried longer, on purpose.

That's fine. Mortgages are fine. The trouble starts when you stop making payments. If your final merge to main is a multi-day knife fight, you didn't have a bad merge — you had months of skipped payments coming due all at once.

And the part most teams get backwards: features go to main, fixes flow from the release branch back. Don't merge main into release. That's pushing up, not pulling down.

The full lifecycle, the four rules, and the warning signs are in the video.