finishing-a-development-branch

Finalizing a development branch after tests pass involves verifying the build, detecting the base branch, and selecting a completion path: merge locally, push for a pull request, keep for later, or discard.

Merging a finished feature branch locally is best handled by running deterministic git commands with safety checks, ensuring tests pass first, then guiding the merge directly into the detected base branch.

Cleaning up a git worktree after completing a feature branch requires selecting a finalization option that triggers guardrails, offering explicit clean-up steps to safely remove the branch or worktree after integration.

This branch finalization workflow supports creating a pull request by pushing the completed development branch to a remote repository, which is one of the four explicit options presented after test verification.

You should discard a development branch instead of merging when the finished work is no longer needed, selecting the discard option from the four structured choices to safely remove the unwanted changes.