Step 1 — Discover the team's base branches

Do not assume main or staging. Detect first:

git remote show origin | grep "HEAD branch"   # default branch
git branch -r | grep -E "staging|develop|trunk|release"  # integration branch

Set two variables for the rest of this workflow:

$DEFAULT — the repo's default branch (e.g. main, trunk)
$INTEGRATION — shared pre-release branch if one exists (e.g. staging, develop). If none, use $DEFAULT.

Use $INTEGRATION as the base for feature branches unless the team bypasses it by policy.

Step 2 — Triage complexity

Before creating any branch, assess the issue scope:

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Jun 15, 2026

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