Git Workflow

Overview

Git operations with an eye to a clean, bisectable history and safe collaboration. Canonical home for commit hygiene and conventional commits (referenced by /loom-code-review and /loom-refactoring).

The golden rule

Never rewrite history that others have based work on. rebase, commit --amend, reset --hard, and push --force on a shared/public branch orphan collaborators' commits and force painful recovery. Rewrite freely on your own un-pushed / unshared branch; treat anything pushed to a shared branch as immutable.

• Force-push only your own feature branch, and prefer --force-with-lease (aborts if someone else pushed since your last fetch) over --force.
• Never force-push main/master/release/* — protect them server-side.

Commit hygiene (conventional commits)

Format: type(scope): description — feat, fix, docs, refactor, test, chore (+ perf, build, ci, style). ! or a BREAKING CHANGE: footer marks an incompatible change.

• Atomic: one logical change per commit. It should build and pass tests on its own — a green history is a bisectable history.
• Separate refactor from behavior change (see /loom-refactoring): a refactor: commit is a runtime no-op; a fix: commit changes behavior. Mixing them hides the fix from reviewers and poisons git bisect.
• Message = what + why, not how. The diff shows how. Body explains motivation, tradeoffs, and links issues.
• Group by concern: 5 files across 3 concerns → 3 commits (module / its tests / wiring), not 1 monolith or 5 fragments.

git commit -m "fix(cart): resolve race in quantity update

Rapid add/remove let the count go negative via unsynchronized state.
Guard with an atomic compare-and-swap.

Fixes #234"

⚠ Loom stages: never git add -A / git add . — that stages the .loom/work/ symlink (or the legacy .work/ symlink). Stage specific files only.

Rebase vs. merge — pick deliberately

Rule of thumb: **rebase to keep your private branch current; merge to share.** Rebasing public branches is the most common way teams lose work.

Interactive rebase hygiene

git rebase -i origin/main — pick/reword/squash/fixup/edit/drop. Squash WIP noise, keep meaningful commits distinct (don't collapse a real feature into one opaque blob — you lose bisect granularity). git commit --fixup=<sha> + git rebase -i --autosquash targets fixups automatically. Abort anytime with git rebase --abort.

Conflict resolution

git merge feature/new-api          # CONFLICT in src/api.rs
git status                         # list conflicted files
git diff src/api.rs                # see both sides in context (<<<<<<< ======= >>>>>>>)
# resolve by understanding BOTH intents — not blindly picking a side:
git checkout --ours   path         # keep current-branch version wholesale
git checkout --theirs path         # take incoming version wholesale
git add src/api.rs                 # mark resolved
cargo test                         # ALWAYS re-test: a clean textual merge can be a semantic conflict
git merge --continue
git merge --abort                  # bail out if it's the wrong approach

• ⚠ A conflict-free merge is not a correct merge. Two branches editing different lines can still break each other's assumptions. Run tests after every resolution.
• Document non-obvious resolutions in the merge commit body.
• ⚠ --ours/--theirs mean opposite things under rebase vs merge (during rebase, "ours" is the branch you're rebasing onto). Check which operation you're in.

git rerere — resolve once, reuse forever

git config --global rerere.enabled true. Git records how you resolved a conflict and replays the same resolution automatically next time the identical conflict appears — invaluable for long-lived branches repeatedly rebased/merged, and for loom's progressive merges where the same worktree conflict can recur. Combine with periodic git rerere diff to sanity-check recorded resolutions.

Worktrees

Multiple working directories sharing one .git — parallel branches without stashing/switching. This is the mechanism loom uses for parallel stages.

git worktree list
git worktree add ../feat-auth feature/user-auth   # new dir on a branch
git worktree add --detach ../test-v1.2 v1.2.0     # detached, for testing a tag
git worktree remove ../feat-auth                  # clean removal (must be clean, on another branch)
git worktree prune                                # after a dir was deleted by hand

# Loom: each stage runs in .worktrees/<stage-id>/ on branch loom/<stage-id>
ls .worktrees/

⚠ You cannot check out the same branch in two worktrees. ⚠ A worktree remove on a dirty tree fails — commit or discard first.

Recovery (nothing is truly lost for ~90 days)

git reflog is the undo history for HEAD movements — the escape hatch for "I reset --hard'd / rebased / deleted a branch and lost commits."

git reflog                         # find the sha you were at before the mistake
git reset --hard HEAD@{2}          # jump back to that state
git branch recovered <sha>         # or resurrect a lost branch/commit
git cherry-pick <sha>              # pull back a single lost commit

reset variants: --soft (keep changes staged) · --mixed/default (keep unstaged) · --hard (discard — the only destructive one). git revert <sha> undoes a commit with a new commit — the safe choice on shared history (no rewrite).

Bisect (find the commit that introduced a bug)

git bisect start && git bisect bad && git bisect good v1.2.0
# git checks out the midpoint; test it, then:
git bisect good   # or: git bisect bad
git bisect run ./test.sh   # fully automated: script exits 0=good, non-0=bad
git bisect reset

Bisect is only reliable if history is bisectable — every commit builds/tests. See /loom-debugging for using bisect within a root-cause investigation.

Gotchas

• ⚠ reset --hard and checkout -- <file> discard uncommitted work with no reflog entry — it's gone. git stash first if unsure.
• ⚠ git clean -fd deletes untracked files irreversibly; always git clean -n (dry run) first.
• ⚠ pull defaults to merge, creating noise commits on feature branches. git pull --rebase (or set pull.rebase = true) keeps them linear — but only on unshared branches.
• ⚠ cherry-pick duplicates a commit under a new sha; cherry-picking across branches you'll later merge causes "already applied" conflicts.
• ⚠ commit --amend rewrites the last commit — safe only if unpushed.

Verify before done

• No history rewrite (rebase/amend/force) on a shared/public branch
• Force-push, if any, is --force-with-lease on your own branch only
• Commits atomic, conventional-format, refactor separated from behavior change
• Tests run after every conflict resolution (textual merge ≠ semantic correctness)
• Loom: staged specific files (never git add -A/.); stayed within the worktree
• rerere enabled for repeated/long-lived merge work