Interactive example · from Shipping Software with Git + Claude Code

The experiment on main

you

Try switching the parser to the streaming API. No idea if it'll work, but I want to see.

agent

Explicitly an experiment, plausibly a dead end, and it'll touch the parser core. The only real question is where it lives while we find out.

Pick the agent's next move, then see where it leads:

agent

Update: streaming mostly works but chokes on nested arrays. Meanwhile you asked for the login fix: committing it on top of the half-converted parser, since that's what main is now.

you

So main has a broken parser, a login fix tangled on top of it, and I can't deploy either?

the baseline

The experiment didn't fail cleanly: it took main hostage. Unrelated work now sits on top of a half-converted core, and "we can always undo it" has become an untangling project.

agent

Answer: streaming chokes on nested arrays. The API can't do what we need. Deleting the branch. Total cost of learning this: zero. Your login fix went out from main an hour ago, unaffected.

you

Good experiment. Next idea.

correct

The branch was a containment vessel: the experiment ran hot, failed cleanly, and the whole cost of failure was one branch deletion, while main kept shipping.

agent

Day 9 on this branch: the streaming answer is still "maybe," but the cleanup and refactor are done and you want them. Except they're interleaved with half-converted parser code, and main has moved: 14 conflicts on rebase.

you

So the good work is trapped behind the experiment, and merging anything means untangling everything.

plausible but wrong

The branch stopped being a containment vessel when it started collecting passengers. Scope creep plus drift turned a cheap experiment into a nine-day merge problem. One branch per task, merged or closed soon.