A gentle introduction to Git worktrees

Git worktrees have been around for over ten years, but if you’re like me, you might not have heard of them until recently. AI coding tools now regularly use worktrees to make local changes in parallel, allowing multiple coding agents to work autonomously without interfering with each other’s work. Once complete, you can then merge those worktrees back into your repository. This allows you to avoid sending code to the cloud while still parallelizing as much work as possible. Worktrees are an elegant solution to the parallelization problem, although they are frequently misunderstood and, more importantly, poorly explained. This post demystifies worktrees so you can get up and running quickly. Creating branches You can think of a worktree as a branch that exists in a different location from the project root. It still maintains all of the commit history from the root, it just exists in a different space. You can push and pull from remotes, too. For all intents and purposes, it functions…