Creating Conventional Branches

Creating Conventional Branches

Creates a new Git branch using the Conventional Branch pattern and verifies the result.

Prerequisites

• Branch naming context (issue number, ticket number, or short task description)
• Clean git working directory, or explicit user approval to proceed with local changes

Workflow

1. Preflight

Skip the git status call only when a coordinator preflighted immediately before invoking this skill and no file-changing step has run since. Otherwise:

git status --short --branch

• None — proceed (clean)
• Only ?? — proceed (untracked files survive git checkout -b)
• Any M A D R C — stop and ask the user before creating a branch
• Any U / AA / DD — stop; resolve before branching

2. Switch to the Up-to-Date Default Branch

Resolve the default branch via origin/HEAD, falling back to main:

git fetch origin
DEFAULT=$(git rev-parse --abbrev-ref origin/HEAD 2>/dev/null)
DEFAULT=${DEFAULT#origin/}
DEFAULT=${DEFAULT:-main}
git checkout "$DEFAULT"
git pull --ff-only

If origin/HEAD is unset, run git remote set-head origin --auto once before retrying.

If the user explicitly asks to branch from a different base, skip this step.

3. Gather Branch Inputs

Collect:

• Issue or ticket number (if available)
• Short description from the issue title or task summary
• Type signal from labels or request language (bug, feature, docs, etc.)

4. Select Branch Prefix

• fix/ — bugs, defects
• hotfix/ — critical or urgent production fixes
• chore/ — docs, dependencies, tooling, maintenance
• release/ — release branches
• feat/ — everything else (default, including new features and enhancements)

5. Build the Description Slug

Lowercase, alphanumerics + hyphens only; 3–8 words.

6. Compose the Branch Name

Use one of these formats:

• With issue number: <prefix>/<issue-number>-<description-slug>
• Without issue number: <prefix>/<description-slug>

Examples:

feat/123-add-user-authentication
fix/456-resolve-login-timeout
chore/update-readme-links

7. Create

git checkout -b <branch-name>

If the branch already exists, check it out instead with git checkout <branch-name>.

Notes

• Prefer issue number in the branch name when available.
• Usable directly or as a sub-step inside addressing-github-issues.