Git Worktree: The Infrastructure That Unlocks Agentic Development

You're Locked Out of Your Own Codebase Here's the scenario: you start a Copilot CLI session to refactor your authentication module. The agent is deep into multi-file edits, running tests, iterating on failures. Fifteen minutes in, Slack pings — production hotfix needed. You stare at your terminal. You can't switch branches. You can't stash the agent's half-finished work. You can't even review a teammate's PR without blowing up the agent's context. This is the blocking problem of agentic development, and every developer using AI coding agents hits it. The traditional workarounds — git stash, partial commits, cloning the entire repo again — are fragile, slow, or wasteful. There's a better answer, and it's been hiding in Git since 2015. Git worktree gives you multiple working directories from a single repository. One .git database, multiple checkouts, zero duplication of history. And in 2026, it's become the foundational infrastructure that makes parallel agentic development actually work