Please stop writing straw man arguments to sell your product. Worktrees do work as intended for most people. And they work better than your broken homepage.
Git worktrees are not an isolation boundary for coding agents
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Re: Git worktrees are not an isolation boundary for coding agents
#12If you want to properly isolate things, use containers. That's not what worktrees are for.
Re: Git worktrees are not an isolation boundary for coding agents
#13Do people not know how to write blogs without AI anymore? I enjoy hearing a human's unique voice and miss hearing it when it's abscent.
Re: Git worktrees are not an isolation boundary for coding agents
#14I haven’t hit these issues when using worktrees. But what’s a pain is having to compile from scratch every time, and not carrying over gitignored files.
I set up a custom hook in Claude which runs my own worktree creation/cleanup script, which takes care of copying my node_modules into the worktree, my .env (plus doing some edits to the .env to isolate it so it can run in parallel), and stuff like that. Each worktree gets its own docker compose project name so they can run docker stacks in parallel. Works pretty seamlessly.
Re: Git worktrees are not an isolation boundary for coding agents
#15Do people not know how to write blogs without AI anymore? I enjoy hearing a human's unique voice and miss hearing it when it's abscent.
You can literally tell from the box styling that it's AI now. Awful.
Re: Git worktrees are not an isolation boundary for coding agents
#16For me the most pragmatic way to solve this is in the agent harness layer simply prohibiting commands like git force and others in the settings configuration of your harness of choice with pre tool hooks, its quite easy to setup, obvious ones are prohibiting pushes to main, among others. Unless someone is building their harness from scratch like you this is a 30sec configuration and you could just save your list of b…
Agreed. I had to solve this at the harness layer myself. It just makes more sense to me this way. We basically created hooks around these operations and you can configure what happens at these calls.
Disclosure: I'm building AQ (aq.dev) a multiplayer coding harness.
Re: Git worktrees are not an isolation boundary for coding agents
#17If you want to properly isolate things, use containers. That's not what worktrees are for.
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Re: Git worktrees are not an isolation boundary for coding agents
#18I haven’t hit these issues when using worktrees. But what’s a pain is having to compile from scratch every time, and not carrying over gitignored files.
look into .worktreeinclude
Re: Git worktrees are not an isolation boundary for coding agents
#19Git worktrees are a great isolation boundary for _changes_ (especially making changes in parallel on a single machine), but not behavior. If you are trying to actually run autonomous agents securely you need something that lives outside the harness that actually blocks actions in a way that can't be prompted around.
We use nono [1] for this internally, essentially blocking any actions we don't want agents to be able to do without human approval. Our developers can just run `task claude` or whatever their harness is) and it pre-wraps it with our profile that enforces:
- Filesystem: read/write only the worktree plus dev-tooling dirs (Go, Doppler, Graphite caches, git common dir); explicitly no Docker socket and it can't edit its own Claude settings files (so it can't loosen its own permissions).
- Network: outbound only to an allowlist - Anthropic, Doppler, Go module proxies, our dev environments while still allowing binding local dev-server ports.
- GitHub: read anything in the org, and create/edit PRs and push branches - but it cannot merge, close, review, or comment on PRs, delete branches, touch repo settings/secrets, manage auth, or use raw gh api. Those are all "human-only". GitHub tokens are never exposed to the agent; they're injected by a proxy so it can't read or exfiltrate them.
This is great because it is harness agnostic - any developer can use whatever harness they want as long as they port the nono profile to it, as it will enforce all of the above in a way that is not tied to a specific harness implementation
Re: Git worktrees are not an isolation boundary for coding agents
#20If you can't be fucked to write your blog, nobody will be fucked to read it.