Parallel Universes: Branching for AI Experiments

You have a feature idea — or maybe an ambitious AI prompt that might refactor half your codebase. Before you do anything, create a branch where it's safe to experiment.

First, make sure you're on main and it's up to date. Then create your branch:

git switch -c feature/my-new-idea
# Older equivalent: git checkout -b feature/my-new-idea

In VS Code, this is even easier. Look at the bottom-left corner of your window -- you'll see the current branch name (e.g., "main"). Click it and you'll get a dropdown where you can switch to existing branches or select "+ Create new branch..." to make a new one:

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When you click the branch name, VS Code opens a Quick Pick menu listing all your branches. Select "+ Create new branch..." at the top, type a name like feature/my-new-idea, and you're immediately switched to it:

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Try It: Oops — Committed to Main

You're not working in a vacuum. While you've been building your feature, your teammates have been merging theirs. Staying in sync is how you avoid painful surprises later.

Before diving into the commands, here's how the three main remote operations relate to each other:

Fetch downloads without merging. Pull = fetch + merge. Push uploads your commits.

Option 1: The "Safe" Sync (fetch + merge)

git fetch origin        # Download new commits (doesn't apply them)
git merge origin/main   # Merge the updates into your branch

Option 2: The "Easy" Sync (pull)

git pull origin main    # Fetch + merge in one command

VS Code makes syncing visual. Look at the status bar at the bottom of your window -- you'll see small arrows with numbers showing how many commits are incoming (to pull) and outgoing (to push). Click the sync icon (circular arrows) to pull and push in one step:

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You'll also see a prominent "Sync Changes" button right in the Source Control panel. It shows the exact count of incoming and outgoing commits, so you always know what's about to happen:

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Try It: Fetch and Merge Remote Updates

Your feature is built, tested, and committed. But you don't just push it into production — you propose it. A pull request is a conversation: "Here's what I built. Let's review it together."

Once your feature is ready, push your branch to the remote so your teammates can see it:

git push -u origin feature/my-new-idea
# -u links your local branch to the remote branch

Then on GitHub, you'll see a yellow banner: "feature/my-new-idea had recent pushes. Compare & pull request." Click it to create your PR.

The Modern PR Arc: Draft → Ready → Review → Merge

Open work-in-progress as a draft PR — visible to the team, CI running, but explicitly not asking for review yet. Click "Ready for review" when it is. Drafts stopped being a nicety in the agent era: every cloud coding agent (GitHub Copilot's coding agent, Claude, Codex, Devin) delivers its work as a draft PR for you to review — so this arc is the one you'll live in daily.

Two more things you'll meet on your first real PR:

• The merge button is a menu. "Merge commit" preserves your branch's commits; "Squash and merge" (the most common team default) collapses the whole PR into one clean commit on main; "Rebase and merge" replays them individually. Squash is why messy WIP commits on your branch are fine — they vanish at the gate.
• An AI reviewer may get there first. Many repos auto-request a review from GitHub Copilot (or a similar bot). Read it like a helpful-but-junior teammate: it only ever leaves comments — it never counts toward the required human approval, and it's sometimes wrong. Push back when it is.

Writing a good PR description can feel tedious, but AI tools can help with that too:

After the Merge: Leave the Campsite Clean

git switch main
git pull                  # Bring the merged work home
git branch -d feature/my-new-idea   # Delete the merged branch (-d is safe:
                                    # it refuses if work isn't merged)
git fetch --prune         # Drop tracking refs for branches deleted on GitHub

(GitHub can auto-delete the remote branch on merge — repo Settings → General → "Automatically delete head branches." Turn it on; nobody misses stale branches.)

You don't even need to leave VS Code to create a PR. Install the GitHub Pull Requests extension and you can create PRs, review diffs, add comments, approve, and merge -- all without opening your browser:

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Try It: Branch, Commit, and Push