Trunk-Based Development Working for Salesforce Without a Single Org

I've wanted easy trunk-based development for Salesforce for years. Short-lived branches, frequent merges, small pull requests, and CI fast enough that developers aren't afraid to commit. The same practices that engineering teams use everywhere else. Every time I tried to make it work, I hit the same wall: Apex tests require an org. That single dependency turns every validation run into an infrastructure problem. Before a test can execute, you need authentication, environment provisioning, metadata deployment, test execution, and cleanup. The result is feedback loops measured in minutes instead of seconds. I got tired of waiting and built Nimbus, a local Apex runtime that executes Apex tests without an org. This is what I learned while trying to make trunk-based development actually work for Salesforce. Why trunk-based development is hard in Salesforce Trunk-based development depends on fast feedback. If validation takes seconds, developers make smaller changes, merge more frequently, and keep branches short-lived. If validation takes fifteen minutes, behavior changes. Pull requests get larger, unrelated work gets batched together, and validation stops happening continuously because validation itself becomes expensive. Salesforce has always had a structural challenge here because Apex only runs inside Salesforce. A typical validation pipeline looks something like this: sf org login jwt sf org create scratch sf project deploy start sf apex run test sf org delete scratch There is nothing inherently wrong with these steps. The problem is that most of them have nothing to do with testing. They're infrastructure management. The actual validation of business logic is only one part of the process. The longer I worked with Salesforce CI, the more obvious it became that the bottleneck wasn't Apex itself. The bottleneck was everything required to create an environment where Apex could run. The solutions I tried first Before building a local runtime, I tried solving the problem