The guides · № 4 · 6 steps draft

Shipping Software with Git + Claude Code

Git was already the safety net under fast-moving software; an agent makes it essential. These steps are the git habits that turn agent speed from a risk into an asset, adoptable one at a time, each with a paste-into-Claude setup.

Distilled from one practitioner's measured usage: logged sessions, the incidents that recurred, and the patterns that stopped them. v0. Step slugs are stable; chapters may be cut or reordered before 1.0.

The steps

Ordered by leverage-per-effort, but every step stands alone: start where it hurts. In a hurry, step 0 is the baseline in one paste.

1. 00 The one-paste repo baseline

   Optional full-package setup: a clean repo, a working CLAUDE.md, checkpoint-commit and review habits, in one confirmation-gated paste.

2. 01 Checkpoint commits

   Small, frequent, single-purpose commits: the save points that make agent speed safe.

3. 02 Branches bound the blast radius

   A branch per task keeps main deployable; worktrees give parallel agents isolated copies that can't collide.

4. 03 Write history for the next reader

   Commit messages that say why, and agents that read log and blame before editing: history as the context channel between sessions.

5. 04 Review the diff, not the summary

   The diff is the unit of trust: merge on what the code says, never on the agent's account of it.

6. 05 Recovery is cheap. Use it.

   Revert-first culture, reflog as the safety net, and the irreversible commands that stay human. Git makes agent mistakes cheap if you let it.

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