Additional Usage Pointers

Prompting Strategies

We found that it is often a good idea to spend some time conceptualizing and planning a task before actually implementing it, especially for non-trivial tasks. For very complex tasks, you can make a detailed plan in one session, where Serena may read a lot of your code to build up the context, and then continue with the implementation in another, having persisted the plan in a memory or dedicated file.

Serena and Git Worktrees

git-worktree can be an excellent way to parallelize your work. More on this in Anthropic: Run parallel Claude Code sessions with Git worktrees.

Be sure to add the .serena folder to version control, such that your project-specific settings and memories are available across worktrees.

When you launch a CLI agent from inside a worktree using --project-from-cwd, Serena activates the worktree itself, even if the worktree lives under another Serena project (for example <repo>/.claude/worktrees/<name>, where Claude Code creates them natively). The nearest project boundary wins: the worktree’s own .git pointer file takes precedence over an ancestor’s .serena/project.yml, so file operations always resolve against the correct working tree.