branch-hygienelisted

# Post-merge branch hygiene After any merge to `develop` / `main`, the other open PRs that branched from the merged work appear `CONFLICTING` on GitHub because the merge commit assigned new SHAs to commits whose patches are now in the base. Resolution is mechanical: rebase + force-push. ## Before you merge a PR others are based on Merging is where a stack is lost, and both failure modes look like the tool helping. 1. **Find the children, and retarget them FIRST**: ```bash gh pr list --base <branch-about-to-merge> --json number,headRefName gh pr edit <n> --base <the parent's own base> # BEFORE the merge ``` Merging the parent does **not** retarget a child — it leaves it running its checks against a branch nobody will push to again. Deleting the parent's branch does not retarget it either: it **closes** it. And a closed PR can be neither retargeted (`Cannot change the base branch of a closed pull request`) nor reopened once its base branch is gone, so the only recovery is a new PR from the same branch — the review history stays behind on the closed one. 2. **Remove the worktree holding the branch**, or `--delete-branch` fails with `cannot delete branch '<x>' used by worktree at …` and the merge lands with the branch still there — which is the state that leaves a child stranded. ```bash git worktree remove <path> && gh pr merge <parent> --squash --delete-branch ``` 3. **Then rebase each child** onto the new base, per the