Branch Awareness

Branch Awareness

Agents in Ptah are branch-aware. The current branch name, upstream tracking info, and recent branch-specific commits are all part of the context bundle that every agent receives.

This isn’t cosmetic — it changes what agents do.

What agents know about the branch

At spawn time, each agent sees:

Field	Example	Used for
Branch name	feature/workspace-intelligence	Inferring the task (often encoded in the name)
Upstream	origin/feature/workspace-intelligence	Deciding whether to suggest a push
Ahead / behind	5 ahead, 0 behind	Warning about unsynced commits
Base branch	main (auto-detected)	Scoping diffs for PR descriptions
Recent commits on branch	Last 10 subjects	Understanding the arc of the branch
Dirty files	From git status	Scoping edits to in-progress work

How this changes behavior

Concrete examples:

1. Branch-name inference

On a branch called fix/auth-redirect-loop, an agent asked “what’s going on here?” starts with the assumption you’re investigating an auth redirect bug, not writing a new feature.

2. Scoped refactors

On a branch called refactor/extract-git-service, an agent asked to refactor something will look at what’s already been changed on the branch (via git diff main...HEAD) and continue in that direction instead of starting over.

3. PR description drafting

Ask an agent to draft a PR description and it automatically scopes the diff to the branch (base...HEAD), not the entire working tree. The draft reflects exactly what will be in the PR, not what you happen to have dirty locally.

4. Branch-specific warnings

If you’re on main and ask an agent to make a risky change, it may suggest creating a feature branch first:

“This change touches the provider registry, which affects all workspaces. Want me to create a branch refactor/provider-registry before editing?”

Branch switches during a chat

When you switch branches mid-chat, Ptah’s next agent invocation in that chat sees the new branch state. The chat history stays — agents get the new branch as updated context, not as a reset.

Note

Branch switches do not automatically purge earlier context. If you asked the agent to review a file on branch-a and then switched to branch-b, the earlier review is still in the transcript. Be explicit about what you want the agent to do in the new state.

Turning off branch context

If you want a clean, branch-agnostic run — for example, when asking a general programming question — use Chat → Show context → Git state and toggle it off. Future messages in that chat omit git context until re-enabled.