Making My Git Workflow Safer with PRs

Had a custom /git-sync skill in Claude Code that would commit and push directly to main. Convenient, but not great for code quality. Changed it to create branches and PRs instead.

The problem

My original git-sync workflow was:

git add .
git commit -m "message"
git push origin main

Works, but skips code review entirely. Not a big deal for solo projects, but bad habits form fast.

What I changed

Updated the skill to follow a PR-based workflow:

1. Check for changes
2. Generate branch name from commit message
3. Create branch and commit
4. Push to remote
5. Create PR with gh pr create
6. Return the PR link

The branch naming follows conventional commits:

Commit Type	Branch Name
feat:	feat/description
fix:	fix/description
docs:	docs/description

So a commit like feat: Add user auth becomes branch feat/add-user-auth.

The new flow

# Before (dangerous)
git add . && git commit -m "feat: thing" && git push origin main

# After (safer)
git checkout -b feat/thing
git add . && git commit -m "feat: thing"
git push -u origin feat/thing
gh pr create --title "feat: thing" --body "..."
# Returns: https://github.com/user/repo/pull/123

Key safety features

• Never commits to main/master directly - always creates a branch
• Smart branch detection - if already on a feature branch, asks whether to use it or create new one
• PR link returned - easy to share for review

Gotchas

Need GitHub CLI installed and authenticated:

brew install gh
gh auth login

Without it, the PR creation step fails. The skill handles this gracefully though - commits locally and tells you to push manually.

Why bother?

Even for personal projects, PRs help:

• Force yourself to write decent commit messages
• GitHub shows nice diffs for review
• Easy to revert if something breaks
• Build good habits for team work

Takes 2 extra seconds but saves headaches.