When you're vibe coding, git is your seatbelt. The agent will sometimes rewrite your file in a way you don't want. The agent will sometimes "clean up" code that wasn't broken. The agent will sometimes invent a solution that looks like progress but is actually moving you sideways.

Git is how you survive these situations.

THE RULES:

COMMIT BEFORE EVERY AGENT RUN. Before you ask the agent to do anything substantive, commit your current state with a message like "working state before [task]." If the run goes badly, you git reset back to that commit.

BRANCH PER FEATURE. Don't let agents work on main. Create a branch (git checkout -b feature/customer-search), let the agent work there, review the result, merge to main only when you're satisfied.

READ EVERY DIFF. Before merging, run git diff main..feature/your- branch (or use the GitHub/GitLab UI). Read every line. Don't merge diffs you haven't read.

NEVER FORCE-PUSH TO SHARED BRANCHES. Force-pushing rewrites history and can erase other people's work. If you don't know what force-pushing is, that's fine. It means you'll never accidentally do it.

WRITE COMMIT MESSAGES THE AGENT CAN UNDERSTAND. "Fix login" is bad. "Fix login: validate email format before database lookup, return 400 on missing fields, add rate limit tracking" is good. The next agent session will read your commit history; help it understand what's been done.

USE TAGS FOR RELEASES. When you ship a version that works, tag it (git tag v0.1.0). If a later change breaks something in production, you can roll back to the tag in seconds.

A practical workflow:

$ git status # clean working tree $ git checkout -b feature/inventory # new branch $ git commit --allow-empty -m "starting inventory feature"

... ask the agent to do the work ...

$ git diff # review the agent's changes $ git add . $ git commit -m "Inventory feature: low-stock alerts, vendor reorder UI" $ git checkout main $ git merge feature/inventory # merge after review

If something goes wrong mid-way: $ git reset --hard HEAD # nuke uncommitted changes $ git checkout main # go back to main $ git branch -D feature/inventory # delete the broken branch

Try again with a better spec.