Git Forgot Me — Relearning Version Control in 2026
Rebase still scared me. Here is the mental model that finally made it click for good.
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When I left engineering, git was something I half-understood and fully feared. I knew enough commands to get through a day and a Slack channel to bail me out of the rest. Coming back, I decided to actually learn the thing instead of cargo-culting it.
The model that finally stuck
Stop thinking about commands. Think about three places your work can live: your working directory, the staging area, and the commit history. Almost every command just moves changes between those three buckets. Once I drew that on a napkin, half the fear evaporated.
$ git status # what's in each bucket right now
$ git add -p # move hunks into staging, one at a time
$ git commit # snapshot the staging area into history
Rebase isn’t scary, it’s honest
Rebase replays your commits on top of someone else’s. That’s it. The reason it feels dangerous is that it rewrites history — but on your own branch, before you push, that’s exactly what you want. A clean, linear story instead of a tangle of merge bubbles.
The agent tools help here too: I now ask for the plan before the commands, read it, and only then run them. Turns out understanding beats memorizing — same as it always did.