# A lazy developer's guide to unleashing the minion armies

Agentic development has unlocked whole new layers of 'work smarter, not harder'. But to extract all that hands-off goodness you need to follow a few simple rules.

Work in parallel With agents, single-threading development is the mental equivalent of spending all day in bumper to bumper traffic. Stopping and starting your way through the day is painful. Make it easy on yourself and have a few things running in parallel.

Conflict avoidance — now a feature! Give each agent its own environment and they can't step on each other. Put each kid at their own table — separate branch, separate node_modules, separate everything. Let them make a mess. It won't be your mess.

Make the tools do the work Every time you type the same git commands, a little part of you dies. Why should you have to remember git syntax? Let the scaffolding take care of itself.

This is the philosophy. Worktrees are the answer. wt is the implementation.

## What wt does

The whole worktree lifecycle — create, initialize, work, push, and clean up — collapses into a handful of commands:

1wt new feature-name       # Create worktree + branch
2wt switch feature-name    # CD into it, fuzzy matches
3wt init                   # Copy .env files, install deps, generate schemas
4# ...unleash your minions...
5wt submit                 # Rebase onto main + push
6wt watch                  # Poll CI and review status, alert when done
7wt prune                  # Clean up the mess when it's over

wt is a thin usability layer on top of git. No custom file format, no lock-in. If you decide it's not for you and rip it out, everything still works.

## How it helps

### Zero-config initialization

Git doesn't care about your problems. Copy over the things you actually need to run the app? Why would we do something so convenient? Better to abandon all those useful files in your old directory.

wt init handles it. It detects lockfiles from pnpm, yarn, bun, npm, Go, Cargo, Bundler, and pip, copies .env files from your main worktree, generates Prisma schemas, and copies AI tool configs so your agents work as expected, immediately. No setup needed, no extra config files in your repo.

### Branch status, all in one place

wt list shows every worktree with PR status, CI checks, and reviews. Stale branches get flagged. Sync status shows how far behind main you are and dirty file counts tell you where you left uncommitted work.

wt rebase --all syncs everything in one shot. If your lockfile changed, it runs wt init to reinstall everything automatically.

### Watch and automerge

wt watch polls GitHub every 15 seconds, showing a live view of CI and review state. Pass the optional --merge flag and it'll merge for you when checks pass. On to the next thing instead of babysitting CI.

### Cleanup

wt prune checks GitHub for merged or closed PRs and removes the corresponding worktrees and branches. It shows you what it's going to delete and asks before doing anything.

wt may not make you a better developer. But it will make you a faster, less annoyed, and likely more impactful one.

brew install mvwi/tap/wt

Or pick apart the source code here. ✌️