Worktrees

I currently have three Claude Code sessions open. One is translating blog posts. Another is writing tests for a CLI. The third is helping me debug a data pipeline. Each one runs in its own worktree, each one in its own Ghostty split, while I jump between them using Cmd+Alt+Arrow. I haven’t opened iTerm2 in months. I haven’t touched tmux in weeks. Everything lives in a single Ghostty window. Is it the perfect setup? No. Is it the most productive setup I’ve ever had? Absolutely. ...

If you’ve read my post about worktrees in Claude Code, you know the key to parallel workflows is a simple flag: --worktree. Run it, and you get an agent working in its own isolated repo copy. Launch three, and you’ve got three agents working in parallel without clashing. Magic. Now you open Codex CLI, look for an equivalent flag… and it doesn’t exist. There’s no --worktree. No --tmux. No isolation: worktree for custom agents. Issue #12862 has been open on GitHub asking for exactly this, with community members proposing their own implementations in forks, but nothing has been merged. Native parallelism for Codex CLI doesn’t exist — not yet. ...

A few weeks ago, I wrote about git worktrees — what they are, how to create them, and why they’re better than cloning a repo three times. The basics. But the basics are only half the story. Because Claude Code doesn’t just work with worktrees — it has native support for them. Dedicated flags, automatic isolation, integration with tmux. And the difference between knowing worktrees exist and knowing how Claude Code uses them is like the difference between having a car and knowing it has sport mode. ...