Git Worktrees Are Not Branches

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 17:33:22 +0530

Today I ran into a scenario where using Git worktree would have avoided a lot of work. Close to 2K lines of reconciliation, because I was trying to redesign the deliberation report viewer for agent-council in 2 different branches, with 2 different agents - Claude, Gemini/Stitch. So I ended up with 2 versions of viewer.ts.

The reflog tells the story. This is from branch#1

HEAD@{13} checkout: main → v0.3.0-epistemic-debugger
HEAD@{12} commit 230ed90: v0.3.0 (big feature commit, touches viewer.ts)
HEAD@{11} commit f4623ce: "10 design audit fixes for viewer"
HEAD@{10} reset: moving to HEAD
HEAD@{9} rebase (start): checkout origin/main
HEAD@{8} rebase (continue): → produces 64c6778
HEAD@{7} rebase (finish)

Meanwhile PR#5, from a different branch was also the redesign that I finally wanted to stick with. This was merged first and then the v0.3.0-epistemic-debugger got rebased onto the updated main immediately after. The damage of the collision is that the diff between pre-rebase and post-rebase, there was 2258 lines changes in viewer.ts alone, which was just reconciliation from the rebase - not feature work. Claude Code handled the rebase, but still - not efficient.

Git on Binary Yoga

Git Worktrees Are Not Branches