Ship as fast as possible! But not faster than that

With great love for the Anthropic team and Claude Code CLI, that I'm using on a daily level, a lot, I must say that their /worktree feature is just confusing.

Claude Code has a "worktree" feature, but it's not exactly worktree as you know it from git. They use the same name to deliver something much less useful, adding to confusion by giving it a slightly different nature. All in all — and to put it bluntly -- kind of bad design.

git worktree add is precise. You give it a path, a branch. Done. Run session in worktree. You control everything.

Claude Code's version creates a new branch you didn't ask for, hides it in .claude/worktrees/, doesn't let you pick the branch or location, and when the session ends — leaves everything behind. Orphaned branches, stale git metadata, empty directories.

The concept of worktree is used here in a strange way. The problem they're solving — isolating agent work from your current branch — is exactly what git worktree already does. One command. No magic.
If they just ran git worktree add under the hood and let you drive, it would actually be useful. Instead they built an abstraction that hides the one thing that made worktrees useful in the first place: you control it.

In my personal opinion it looks like Anthropic is starting to pay the price of shipping features at relentless speed. In the last month they've been hitting that wall often and learning the hard way. The desktop app is buggy all around the place — it literally breaks on a daily level in every imaginable way. And we're talking about one of the best product and dev teams in the world.

Maybe it's time to step back and rethink the shipping approach and quality guardrails in AI driven development. Because the current approach is giving people early draft versions full of half-baked features, which increases frustration and dissatisfaction with an otherwise loved product.

Now we can remix a bit one popular version of Einstein thought: "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler than that!" And in the context of new AI driven development we could say: "Dear Anthropic please ship as fast as possible! But not faster than that."

Practical advice skip /worktree. Use regular git worktree folder_name branch_name. Run claude code session in parallel worktree...