A stash pop hit a merge conflict, a reset cleared the mess, and a stash clear tidied up the list. Two days of uncommitted work were gone. Git had kept the stash commit as an unreachable object, and we got it back with git fsck. Here is how, and the habits that make it unnecessary.
AI coding agents kept running the wrong test command, editing generated files and reading our .env. The fix was repo setup, not better prompts: a short instruction file, deterministic commands, permission rules, formatting hooks and a checked-in MCP config.
A worker image built fine but every container exited at once with "no such file or directory" for a file that clearly existed. A Windows checkout had turned the shebang into /bin/bash with a carriage return. We fixed it with .gitattributes and a CI check.
A developer committed a .env file with a live AWS access key, then deleted it in the next commit. The key stayed in history. We revoked it within 40 minutes, checked CloudTrail, rewrote history with git filter-repo and added scanning so it cannot happen again.
After moving repositories into a new GitHub organization, our coverage-comment and release-tag steps failed with 403 Resource not accessible by integration. The GITHUB_TOKEN defaulted to read-only. A scoped permissions block fixed it, and fork PRs needed a different design.
Our release notes used to be written from memory on Friday afternoon. Structured commit messages let tools compute the next version and the changelog for us. This is the setup we run: commitlint, PR title checks, and either semantic-release or release-please.
A hotfix made on a checked-out tag vanished when the developer switched back to main, and a reset --hard later took a day of work with it. Nothing was really gone: the reflog still pointed at every commit. Here is how we got them back and what gc changes.
Debugging is faster as a method than as inspiration. The six steps we use on every hard bug, from a reliable reproduction to a regression test, walked through on a real slowdown we isolated among 143 commits with an automated git bisect run.