What is finishing-a-development-branch?

Guidance for deciding what to do with a development branch after an automated coding run finishes. It distinguishes the original checkout from the temporary execution checkout and records whether the work is merged, published, kept, or discarded.

Inspecting execution details, confirming that a run is ready to finish, and recording the chosen merge, pull-request, retention, or discard outcome.

It prevents completed worktrees and branches from being silently merged, deleted, or abandoned, and requires checking the run’s status and evidence first.

finishing-a-development-branch — Skill for Claude Code by yimwoo

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.

Any agent

npx skills add yimwoo/hotl-plugin --skill finishing-a-development-branch

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/yimwoo/hotl-plugin

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install hotl, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 20 skills, 9 commands, 1 agent, 1 hook.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/yimwoo/hotl-plugin/finishing-a-development-branch/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/yimwoo/hotl-plugin/finishing-a-development-branch)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/yimwoo/hotl-plugin/finishing-a-development-branch"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/yimwoo/hotl-plugin/finishing-a-development-branch/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/yimwoo/hotl-plugin/finishing-a-development-branch"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/yimwoo/hotl-plugin/finishing-a-development-branch.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 45 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 1,238 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.

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.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00045	$0.01238
Opus 5	$0.00023	$0.00619
Sonnet 5	$0.00009	$0.00248
Haiku 4.5	$0.00005	$0.00124

Measured 10d ago against content hash 60a17109540d, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

finishing-a-development-branch scanned grade A with 0 findings 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 10d ago.

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.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/finishing-a-development-branch/SKILL.md · 105 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 105 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Finishing A Development Branch

Use this after loop-execution, executing-plans, or subagent-execution when the run already has a run_id and you need to decide what happens to the execution branch/worktree next.

Core Idea

HOTL distinguishes between:

Authoring checkout — where the workflow was written (source_branch, source_head)
Execution checkout — where the workflow ran (branch, execution_root, worktree_path)

Finishing is the stage that closes that loop intentionally. Do not silently merge, delete, or abandon the execution worktree.

Step 1: Read Execution Provenance

Run:

hotl-rt summary <run-id> --json

Surface these fields before presenting options:

status
source_branch
branch
execution_root
worktree_path
finish.disposition (if already recorded)
controller owner/status and receipt reasons

If finish.disposition is already set, stop and tell the user the run is already finished.

A successful execution must be ready_to_finish before merge or publish. ready_to_finish means execution evidence is complete but the run is not yet completed. Keep the existing controller lease active and retain HOTL_OWNER_TOKEN; if a different controller is finishing, use explicit owner handoff/takeover rules from resuming first. Run owner heartbeat before a long finish operation.

Step 2: Present The 4 Finish Options

Use these options:

Merge back locally
- Default target: source_branch when present and different from the execution branch
- Fallback target: main or master
Publish branch / create PR
- Push the execution branch to a remote
- If gh is available and the user wants a PR, create it against the chosen target branch
Keep as-is
- Preserve the execution branch/worktree for later review or follow-up changes
Discard
- Remove the execution branch/worktree after explicit confirmation

Explain the target branch explicitly when merge or PR target is inferred from source_branch.

Read the full file on GitHub · 105 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.

10d ago First seen · 105 lines · 45 tokens per session scan A 60a17109540d

Subscribe to this mod's changes

finishing-a-development-branch is a skill published in the GitHub repository yimwoo/hotl-plugin (27 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 45 tokens to every session and 1,238 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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