Skillloaded on invocation

worktree-per-agent

Isolate an agent's work in its own git worktree branched off the default branch, so two agents never land conflicting changes on the shared checkout. Use at the start of any implementation task in a repo where others may also be working, and whenever a repo's instructions say "work in a worktree".

Path: primitives/skills/worktree-per-agent/SKILL.md
Loaded: on invocation
Lines: 62

The shared checkout belongs to the human. An agent that edits it directly races every other agent and every uncommitted human change. So: branch a worktree off the default branch, work there, land the result through the repo’s normal path, remove the worktree.

Create

REPO=$(git rev-parse --show-toplevel)
NAME=<task-slug>
DEST=$(harness worktree create "$NAME" "$REPO")
cd "$DEST"

The dedicated root keeps temporary task checkouts separate from permanent clones. It defaults to ~/worktrees/<repo>/<task>; HARNESS_WORKTREE_ROOT may replace ~/worktrees. The helper fetches origin and branches from origin/main, so it starts from what is actually merged. If the repo’s instructions name a different base, pass --base; if they name a different location, follow them. Never create a task worktree as a sibling under the directory holding permanent repositories.

Work

Install dependencies in the worktree if the repo needs them per checkout; do not assume the shared checkout’s node_modules or virtualenv is reachable.
Run the repo’s quality gate in the worktree before pushing, per verification.md.
Never cd back into the shared checkout to run something “quickly”.

Land

Push the branch and open a PR, or push to main if the repo’s instructions allow it. Then:

harness worktree remove "$NAME" "$REPO" --merged

--merged deletes the local branch as well, and only once gh reports a merged pull request whose head commit is the branch tip. A repository that squash-merges leaves the branch’s own commits out of the default branch, so git branch -d refuses work that did land; that proof is the check instead. Drop --merged to keep the branch. Removal does not count regenerable caches such as __pycache__ that a gate run wrote, and still refuses any other modified, untracked or ignored entry; --also-clear <name> adds a regenerable top-level directory the built-in list misses.

Things that bite

Tooling that resolves paths against the working directory (planning frameworks, skill projections) will not find its files in a worktree. If a tool halts with a missing-script error, that is the guard working; run that tool from the shared checkout only.
Shared append-only documents (a decisions log, a changelog) are not worktree material: two agents appending in two worktrees produce a conflict at merge. Append to those on the default branch in one place.
Generated index files are rebuilt once at merge, never on both sides.
Leftover worktrees confuse git status and history rewrites. git worktree list before any operation that touches every branch. harness worktree audit "$REPO" reports dirty and stale checkouts; a clean checkout can still contain unpublished commits, so audit branch history before removal.