Guide: Parallel Workstreams

A feature request lands. You want an agent on it immediately, but you’re not willing to drop what you’re doing. Here’s how that plays out in Loxel.

Create a worktree for the task

Press N to create a new worktree. Type a name — something like user-invites — and press Enter. Loxel creates the worktree and sets up the branch via the wt integration. Click the new worktree in the sidebar to switch to it.

Your previous worktree’s layout is saved automatically. It’s waiting exactly as you left it.

Hand off the task

With the new worktree active, press T to open a terminal. Start Claude Code, Codex, or whatever agent you use. The terminal already has LOXEL_WORKTREE set, so the agent picks up the right working directory immediately. See Terminals for details.

Once the agent is running you don’t need to stay here.

Switch back to your previous context

Press [ to go back to your main worktree. The layout snaps back — same open files, same panel arrangement. The agent keeps running in the background.

You are unblocked. Do your other work.

Return when the agent is done

A dot on a worktree in the sidebar means one of its terminals raised a notification, and the commit graph shows an uncommitted-changes row for each worktree with pending changes. When you see work accumulating in the task worktree, or when you want to check in, press ] to switch back.

Switch to the agent’s terminal tab to check the output.

Review the diff

Open the Changes panel (C) to see what the agent produced: every changed file, with added and removed line counts. Double-click a file to open it in the diff viewer — side-by-side by default, with synchronized scrolling, gutter connectors between the two sides, and the changed characters highlighted within each line. See Diff Viewer for details on modes.

Leave comments

Open the Comments panel, create a review session (click Reviews in the header → new review icon → name → Enter), and go through the diff file by file. Select any span of code that raises a question and click Add comment in the gutter. Comments are anchored to content, not line numbers — they follow the code if the agent rewrites it. Leave intent-based questions (“is this the right abstraction boundary?”) rather than line-level corrections. See Code Review for the full anchor system reference.

Iterate if needed

Send a follow-up message to the agent in its terminal. Comments track through the rewrite. When the agent finishes, outdated comments keep the original lines under “Original code at time of comment” in the Comments panel — compare them with the new code to verify whether your concern was addressed.

Commit, done

Once you are satisfied, commit from a terminal in the task worktree (or ask the agent to). Other worktrees are unaffected throughout.