0.5: every task on its own branch
Parallel tasks have always been the point of Ordewell, and they have always had one awkward catch: they shared a single checkout. If two tasks needed the same file, the planner had to put them in a queue, and if it got that wrong, one agent's edits could quietly land on top of another's. 0.5 removes the catch.
A worktree per task
In a git repository, every AI task now runs in its own worktree on its own branch.
Your node_modules, .env files and agent config are linked in,
so the agent finds the project the way you left it. Because tasks no longer share
files, the planner stops ordering tasks just because they touch the same one, and
more of the plan can run at once.
When a task passes, its work is committed and merged into one integration branch for the run, in plan order. The tasks that depend on it wait until its work is really on that branch, so they build on what happened rather than on what was supposed to.
You decide what reaches your branch
Nothing is merged into the branch you have checked out until you say so. When the run
finishes you get a handoff: read the diff, merge it, throw the run away, or just clean
up the worktrees. It is /handoff in the terminal, ordewell handoff
on the command line, and a card in VS Code.
Conflicts try to sort themselves out
If a task's work conflicts with what has already landed, the same task gets another go in its kept worktree, on the same runner and model, and is asked to merge the latest work in without losing either side. I did not want the tool taking an agent's word for it, so the repair only counts if git agrees: the branch has to contain the latest work, no conflict markers can be left, and the merge has to go through cleanly. When that fails, the task waits for you and tells you exactly which files are in the way.
Folders full of repositories
A lot of real projects are not one repository. Open a folder that holds several and each task gets a worktree of every one of them, laid out like the folder, so relative paths between them keep working. A task lands in all the repositories it touched or in none, and the final merge is the same: all of them, or none and a clear reason why.
Steering the conversation
The planner conversation got some tools of its own. /rewind goes back to
before any message you sent, in a new session, and gives you that message to edit.
/fork tries something in a copy while the original stays put.
/compact squeezes a long conversation into a summary. None of them touch
your tasks. The planner can also now read what a running task is printing, so when
something looks stuck it can look instead of guessing.
And in the days since
Three smaller releases followed quickly, and a few things in them are worth knowing
about. You can now run as many tasks at once as you like with /parallel,
and a change applies to the run already going. Each project's own environment, from
its .envrc or an .ordewell/env file, now reaches its planner
and agents however Ordewell was started, which also means a project can pick its own
Claude Code account. And a task stuck on an agent's own question, like Claude Code
asking whether to trust a folder, now says it is waiting for you instead of looking
busy forever.
Trying it
npm install -g ordewell@latest
In VS Code, update the Ordewell extension from the Extensions view. Isolation is on by default in any git repository;
if you would rather keep the old behaviour, set worktreeIsolation to false.
The docs cover the details, and the
release notes have
the full list. If something breaks, please
open an issue.