Dead Branch
ELI5 — The Vibe Check
A dead branch is a branch nobody touches anymore. No commits in months, no open PR, no clear purpose. It's just... there. Safe to delete? Probably. Will someone yell at you? Maybe.
Real Talk
A dead branch is an inactive branch with no recent commits and no associated open pull request. Distinct from a zombie branch (which was merged but not deleted), a dead branch represents abandoned work. Cleanup scripts typically flag branches with >90 days of inactivity.
When You'll Hear This
"Grep for dead branches older than 6 months and nuke them." / "That's a dead branch — the project was cancelled in Q2."
Related Terms
Branch Cemetery
A branch cemetery is the graveyard of abandoned feature branches in your repo. Hundreds of them. Nobody knows what's on them. Nobody dares delete them.
Git
Git is like a magical save system for your code. Every time you save (commit), it remembers exactly what changed.
Stale Branch
A stale branch is one that's fallen behind main so much that merging it back in is going to hurt. A branch goes stale in hours on fast-moving teams.
Zombie Branch
A zombie branch is a merged branch that's still lying around in your repo, refusing to stay dead. It got merged weeks ago. The PR is closed.