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You push branch A, then switch to branch B and start working on that. CI failed on branch A, so you stash branch B and switch back to branch A to fix it.

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thanks, that makes sense. I don't see how a worktree is more convenient in that case.

Maybe from the kind of work I do? either CI is failing because of something really simple, or something really complicated that means getting a product setup and producing debug messages. If it's a critical fix on branch A, then I'm not working on branch B. I'm testing branch A locally while CI does its thing

Worktrees are useful particularly because they look like entirely separate projects to your IDEs or other project tooling. They are more useful on larger projects with lots of daily commits. If you just use branches then whenever you switch, in the worst case, your IDE has to blow away caches and reconstruct the project layout or build the project fresh. On large projects this takes significant time. But switching your IDE to a different project, there are now two project and build caches to switch between.

ah interesting. our codebase is over 10gb with about 8 years of history. But, we only have 2-3 merges per week.

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