Woodlot: free Mac app runs parallel Claude Code sessions

The starting complaint is a practical one: Claude Code in a terminal is hard to read and hard to type into, and one session is tolerable while several are not. Because Claude Code works on its own for minutes to tens of minutes after an instruction, the natural move is to start another session, and that is where the trouble begins.

The developer describes two problems. The first is that sessions blur together — you cannot recall what a session was for or whether it is waiting on you, so you end up asking the AI what is going on. Terminal tabs add their own failures: a session stopped on a multiple-choice question sits unnoticed, every tab is named claude, and two sessions in the same repository start rewriting the same files. The second is understanding debt: handing implementation through to a pull request takes your hands off, but leaves you unable to follow what was built, which becomes acute when the AI asks you to make a judgment call.

Woodlot's answer is to combine git worktree management, a view of all sessions, and reading material for catching up in one app. The catch-up feature condenses what happened in your absence into a single page covering the problem, the options weighed, the choice made, and the implementation, so you can return to the decision. Other features were added one at a time through daily use: handover that spins up a fresh worktree from a new one-line instruction, read-only sub-sessions branched off the current conversation, a four-stage track for changes (local, committed, unpushed, PR), CI watching via GitHub, a loop that picks up assigned issues and runs them to merge, a display of context weight and the 5-hour and weekly usage limits, and per-repository settings for the AI account, GitHub account, browser profile, and a setup command run right after a worktree is created.