Code is not a strong confident businesswoman who don't need no man. Code needs us. Specifically, it needs one of us. Collective ownership leads to a tragedy of the commons problem. In many cases, ownership can be informal or implicit. Not every file needs an Officially Agreed Upon Owner. But in shared projects, before you impose stupid rules like "Every commit must be reviewed" or worse "Every commit must have an associated PR" or worst of all "Every commit must have a PR that's somehow linked to a ticket in some abomination of a ticketing system," consider a simpler model. It's called: The model of life. In any shared project, every file has an owner. Then you follow the social norms you'd follow if all the developers and all the files were together in one big physical room. I want to go in a backpack and write on a piece of paper. If it's mine: fine. If it's my girlfriend's or my best friend's backpack and they're not in the room: Probably fine. Depends on details of the relationship. But you probably know if it's ok without having to ask them, based on how close you are and whether they're weird about people touching their stuff. If it's someone you just met: Be extra polite. More than usual. First impressions matter. If it's someone you've worked with for a while, whether you're close or not, you've probably developed an understanding over time of which stuff of their you understand enough to change and which you don't, and in cases where you're unsure: ask. That's what a PR is. A PR is f\*cking _asking._ Don't mandate asking for all human interactions. It's an absurd attempt at midwit social engineering. Treat your devs like people, and teach them that the "best practices" for a shared codebase are exactly the same in every case as the social norms for a shared physical space. And yes, that means it's hard if someone leaves. People matter, and replacing them is never easy. To the extent that any company thinks they've made _that_ fact go away, they only did so by tearing away so much of what matters on a team that your team members don't care about each other and therefore operate at the lowest possible level of trust and mutual delegation. Outsource process to human nature whenever possible. But that's another principle.