Introduction: Power User Tools

Beyond the Basics

Most developers spend their careers using git checkout, git add, and git commit. These commands cover 90% of daily work. But Git is a much deeper tool, and the remaining 10% of scenarios — the hard ones — are exactly where teams lose hours or make costly mistakes.

Consider these real situations:

• Context Switching: You are deep in a half-finished feature when a critical production bug lands in your lap. You cannot commit your broken work, and git stash feels fragile. (git worktree solves this.)
• Automated Debugging: A regression exists somewhere in the last 1,000 commits. You have a test that can detect it, but manually bisecting would take all day. (git bisect run solves this.)
• Dependency Management: Your application depends on a shared internal library that lives in a separate repository. You need to embed it without copy-pasting code. (submodules vs subtrees — each with real trade-offs.)
• Repeated Conflicts: Every time you rebase your long-lived feature branch against main, you resolve the same three merge conflicts. (git rerere solves this.)

Mastering these tools is the difference between a developer who fights Git and one who bends it to their will. Each tool in this lesson solves a specific, concrete problem — and understanding which problem each one solves is as important as knowing the commands.