branching

Rules for creating and managing Git branches, which are separate lines of project work, including branch names, worktrees, and accidentally committed secrets. A worktree is another working folder for the same repository.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when starting features or fixes, choosing a worktree, naming branches, or handling secrets committed to a repository.
Why use it?
It helps keep protected branches safe, makes parallel work easier, and provides a procedure for removing exposed secrets from Git history.

Cursor rule for Cursor

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add rules/andr-ca/agentharness/branching
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/andr-ca/agentharness

Made for: Cursor.

Per session 38 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 1,181 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan C 1 finding. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00038 $0.01181
Opus 5 $0.00019 $0.00590
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00236
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00118

Measured yesterday against content hash 531e0a298d18, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade C, and why

branching scanned grade C with 1 finding against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured yesterday.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Recursive force deletehighDestructive command

rm -rf with a variable or a broad path is one typo away from removing the wrong tree.

- **Remove with git, not `rm -rf`** — `git worktree remove <dir>` (or
.cursor/rules/branching.mdc · 117 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 117 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Branching

Full reference: .github/BRANCHING_STRATEGY.md (worktree deep-dive, .gitignore policy, lifecycle walkthrough). This skill is the actionable summary.

The core rule

Never commit directly to main/master/trunk/develop/production/ release/*. Always: branch → commit → push → PR → merge. This repo enforces it locally via git config core.hooksPath .github/hooks (already set here) — don't rely on the admin bypass.

Branch naming

{type}/{description}, lowercase, hyphens not underscores, short and specific.

Type Purpose
feature/ New feature or enhancement
fix/ Bug fix
refactor/ No behavior change
test/ Testing improvements
docs/ Documentation only
chore/ Maintenance, deps, config
perf/ Performance improvement
ci/ CI/CD changes

Good: feature/user-authentication, fix/email-validation-crash. Bad: update, Feature/UserAuth, fix_everything.

Worktrees

A worktree is a second working directory backed by the same repo, so you can have several branches checked out at once without stashing or re-cloning.

Reach for one when:

  • Running long tests/builds on one branch while you keep coding another.
  • Reviewing a PR branch without disturbing your in-progress work.
  • Running agents in parallel — give each agent/task its own worktree so concurrent runs never fight over one working tree or index. This is the highest-value case for an agent harness.

Skip it for a single quick edit on an already-clean, already-scoped branch — a plain branch switch is cheaper. That exception does not apply once either mandatory condition below is true.

Mandatory, not a preference, before starting new feature/fix implementation work (not Q&A, not read-only investigation) when either is true:

  • git status --porcelain is non-empty (a dirty tree), or
  • the current branch is unrelated to the task (someone else's topic branch, a chore/* tree, anything not already scoped to this work).

Read the full file on GitHub · 117 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. yesterday First seen · 117 lines · 38 tokens per session scan C 531e0a298d18

Subscribe to this mod's changes

branching is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository andr-ca/agentharness (1 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 38 tokens to every session and 1,181 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it C with 1 finding (recursive force delete). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.