git worktrees

Boris Cherny, on 1 February 2026, reported that the Claude Code team's first tip is running three to five git worktrees at once, each with its own Claude session, and called it the largest productivity gain the team had identified. Some engineers keep shell aliases (za, zb, zc) to jump between them; one keeps a worktree reserved for log and BigQuery analysis.

The practice predates that ranking. Jesse Vincent built his September 2025 method on worktrees to isolate tasks across branches, which is what let him assign distinct roles to separate Claude sessions, an architect that plans and an implementer that writes. By October 2025 Superpowers automated worktree creation so that each task starts in its own isolated environment.

Lushbinary's Loop Engineering guide of June 2026 lists worktrees among the parts a functioning loop needs: parallel agents working without file collisions. Michael Segner's August 2026 startup guide gives the practice a different job. Under the rule "build to rebuild", Commure treats rewrites as ordinary work, and worktrees make them affordable: v2 runs beside v1, and the merge happens only if the new version's evals win.

What stays constant across those ten months is the isolation claim. What no account supplies is a number. Cherny's ranking is the team's own judgement, and the figures in Segner's guide are declared by the companies interviewed, with no survey method described.