Managing worktrees manually became a headache quickly (which one has which branch?), and trying to treat them as ephemeral was slow to bootstrap each time.
So I created wtx to manage worktrees for me. Now I just use "wtx checkout mybranch" and claude opens in a worktree.
Under the hood it keeps a reusable pool of worktrees and handles allocation + locking automatically, instead of creating and tearing them down per branch.
There's more sugar included (github pr integration, tmux integration to set the terminal tab title and show which branch you're on instead of just "claude code").