Branch Graveyards

Sweep away the labels that have done their job

Ever opened up a long-running repo, run git branch -r, and watched 200 names scroll past? feature/login, feature/login-old, feature/login-old-2, tmp-debug, wip-quick-fix... It's the classic sign of a team that just never cleans up.

Once the list is unreadable, nobody can tell what's actually alive. New teammates don't know where to look, and you end up needing grep just to find the branch you're supposed to work on. A tidy branch list is unglamorous work, but it quietly improves life for the whole team.

Many teams flip on GitHub's "Automatically delete head branches" so the head branch disappears the moment a PR is merged. Others run a bot that sweeps up stale branches on a schedule. A clean branch list is a small but real sign of a team that has its act together. Cleanup is everyone's job.