Branches: Try Ideas Safely

The Scary Idea

Your site works. It looks good. And then you get a wild idea:

“What if the whole thing was dark mode, with a totally different font?”

It might be amazing. It might be terrible. And trying it means changing everything.

That’s what branches are for.

A branch is a parallel copy of your project, where you can try an idea without touching the version that works.

Your working version lives on a branch called main. When you want to experiment, you make a new branch off it and do all your changes there.

Then you decide:

Love it? Merge it. The idea joins main, and it becomes part of your real site.
Hate it? Delete the branch. main is exactly as you left it, like the experiment never happened.

You could try the idea on main and go back to a save point if it fails. For small changes, that’s fine.

But branches shine for big experiments:

	Trying it on main	Trying it on a branch
Your working site	Gets changed while you experiment	Stays safe the whole time
If it fails	Go back to a save point	Just delete the branch
Comparing	Hard, the old version is gone from view	Easy, switch between the two
Best for	Small tweaks	Big, risky ideas

Small change? Just do it and save. Big risky idea? Branch it.

You can hop between branches any time. Your folder instantly changes to show that branch’s version of every file.

It feels like magic the first time: ask Claude to switch to main, refresh your site, and the dark mode is gone. Switch back, and it’s there again.

You say	What Claude does
“Make a branch called dark-mode to try a new look”	Creates the branch and switches to it
“Which branch am I on?”	Tells you
“Switch back to main”	Shows you your working version again
“I love it, merge dark-mode into main”	The idea becomes part of your real site
“I don’t like it, delete the dark-mode branch”	Throws the experiment away

Try it

Make a branch, change something on it, then switch back to main and see that your change is gone. Then decide: merge it or delete it.

See an example prompt

Make a branch called experiment, and on it, add a line to notes.txt saying "this is just a test". Save a checkpoint.

Then:

Switch back to main and show me what's in notes.txt.

The test line isn’t there. Now choose:

Delete the experiment branch.