What works, what doesn't

This is the first episode of Git When You’re Not Typ­ing, a five-part series where I go back through my 2016 Git course book with one ques­tion for every chap­ter: does this still hold when the com­mit­ter isn’t human? Git didn’t change. Who runs the com­mands did, and that changes which Git prac­tices matter.

In this episode I audit the whole book on cam­era and sort it into three piles: what still holds (atom­ic com­mits, revert, the object mod­el), what broke (Git­flow, stash, twen­ty pages of Sub­ver­sion migra­tion), and what’s miss­ing entire­ly (work­trees, and an answer to the sen­tence I wrote on page 63: ​“local hooks are not a reli­able way to enforce policies”).

Every episode in the series ends with some­thing you can take: a Claude Code hook that blocks destruc­tive git com­mands, a bisect run­ner wired to a Play­wright smoke suite, a one-com­mand work­tree set­up script, and a checked-in guardrails config.