a lane per agent

the worktree-lifecycle substrate for parallel coding agents

never loses work · never reaps what's in use · the registry, not the filesystem, is truth

---

Every vendor ships worktree creation now — claude --worktree, the Claude Agent SDK's isolation: worktree, Cursor, Copilot CLI — and every one of them stops there. Nobody owns the rest of the life: the branch still alive after the pane died, the checkout nobody is sitting in, the tree with 40 uncommitted minutes in it, the branch whose PR merged yesterday and has kept committing since.

If you've ever git worktree list'd through a graveyard trying to remember which of those you can safely delete — that's the problem scruff makes go away.

cd "$(scruff new fix-flaky-test)"  # a lane on this repo: new checkout, new branch, path on stdout
scruff                             # every lane you've got going, live or parked, across every repo
scruff fix-flaky-test              # back later — rebuild the checkout, reopen the agent, where you left off
scruff reap                        # sweep every lane whose branch landed and nobody's standing in
scruff overlap                     # what the OTHER lanes changed, and where their edits and yours share a region

And never git stash again. The stash stack lives in the shared .git dir, so every worktree of a repo and the main checkout push and pop the same one — parallel agents routinely pop each other's work into a tree that never asked for it. scruff park commits your dirty tree as a single wip: commit on the branch only this pane has checked out; scruff unpark puts it back.

install

brew install hausfold/tap/scruff                          # from our tap
nix run github:hausfold/scruff                            # try it
nix profile install github:hausfold/scruff                # keep it
go install github.com/hausfold/scruff/cmd/scruff@latest   # or, with Go 1.26+

scruff skill install                                      # teach your agent it exists

Needs git. gh and lsof are optional and make it sharper; without them scruff degrades toward keep, never toward delete. On haus it's already on PATH, wired to ⌘↵.

the promise

Not "makes worktrees" — every vendor does that. scruff's product is the state machine and three invariants, in this priority order:

1. Never lose work. Every destructive path parks first. The failure direction is always a branch lingers, never a tree vanished.
2. Never reap what's in use. Occupied, dirty, not provably landed, or made in the last hour with nothing committed on it ⇒ keep. Uncertainty resolves to keep — including when GitHub is unreachable.
3. The registry is truth. Not the filesystem, not git worktree list — those are derived, and they lie.

So a command exiting 2 — refused for safety is scruff working, not scruff failing. Don't reach for git worktree remove; ask it why.

the manual

📖 hausfold.co/docs/scruff — and it only lives there: installing, working in lanes, parking, landing and cleanup, runtimes, config, hooks and seams, every verb and exit code, the --json payload, and the five SDKs.

Inside a haus machine it's the AI room, which puts scruff on your PATH and binds ⌘↵ to it.

SDKs

Five clients over the same CLI, sharing one version number: sdk/ts · sdk/python · sdk/rust · sdk/go · sdk/swift (published from a generated mirror, hausfold/scruff-swift — send changes here, never there). Install lines, the two shapes of usage and leases: hausfold.co/docs/scruff/sdks.

in this repo

• ai/SKILL.md — the agent surface: your agent drives scruff correctly first try. It ships inside the binary, so scruff skill install puts it in front of every agent client on the machine (a haus box already has it)
• ai/handoff/SKILL.md — the companion skill: write a brief a cold session can act on, and scruff spawn --prompt-file it into its own lane
• AGENTS.md — hacking on scruff: the invariants, the frozen contracts, what make check doesn't cover
• THANKS.md — the founding testers, and git and the Go libraries underneath it
• SPEC.md — the design of record, and the contracts that are frozen
• docs/releasing.md — how the CLI, all five SDKs and the Homebrew formula move on one number
• scruff --help — the exhaustive flag list

---

_{Nothing here takes something it can't give back — a dirty tree is parked as a commit, and only merged, unoccupied lanes are ever reaped. That's the intent, not a warranty: keep a backup, and tell us what breaks.}

_{MIT · one of the hausfold repos — haus rebuilds the Mac, this is what its agent panes stand on}

⌂ hausfold