A developer's persistent per-dev clone is shared across tasks, so a finished or
abandoned prior task can leave it dirty and on a sibling branch. create_branch's
checkouts then fail on the dirty tree — and because this git work runs as a
side-effect AFTER the claim's DB transition commits, the task is left marked
assigned while the workspace stays on the wrong branch, so the dev's next commit
is rejected BRANCH_MISMATCH (stalling then blocking the task).
reset --hard the tree before the base/feature checkouts. This runs only on a
fresh claim (resume short-circuits in _dev_reentry), so discarded changes are
abandoned cruft from a finished task — never commits (reset --hard keeps HEAD),
never the gitignored .venv. The branch-preservation test invariant is refined to
its real intent: a work-carrying branch must never be RE-POINTED
(reset --hard <base>); a bare tree-clean reset is allowed.
Renn F
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