git

Git source-control safety

The working tree belongs to the user. Make the change, leave it visible, and let them decide what becomes history.

Never without an explicit ask

The user must have asked for that exact write in this session, in their own words. An explicit request to create a new commit counts anywhere in the user's own task text, but it is not a request to amend, push, or tag. Finishing a task without that request does not authorize a history write.

commit, commit --amend, push, tag, rebase, cherry-pick, revert, merge, branch deletion, reset --hard, path restore, and clean -f all require an explicit ask.
Never publish merely because publication would be useful.

Before an authorized discard

Recovery is insurance, not authorization. A save never expands what the user allowed you to delete or overwrite.

When the user explicitly authorized an operation that may discard or broadly overwrite workspace changes, and the workspace is an ordinary Git checkout:

After read_skill gives the physical Git skill package path, run:

bash <git-skill-dir>/scripts/workspace-recovery.sh save before-discard

Keep the printed refs/tbh/recovery/... value in your handoff, then perform only the exact authorized operation.
If the save fails or the workspace is unsupported, stop before destruction and ask the user.

To recover that saved tree later, run:

bash <git-skill-dir>/scripts/workspace-recovery.sh restore <recovery-ref>

Restore first saves the current workspace, leaves HEAD, branch, and the real index in place, and restores the selected snapshot into the worktree. The ref also retains distinct staged bytes when the same path had later worktree edits. Read those staged bytes with git show '<recovery-ref>^2:<path>'; the recovery commit's second parent is the saved index tree. Ignored files are not saved; restore refuses an ignored-path collision rather than overwrite data it could not save. Use only the exact printed ref, not a revision expression.

Always fine

Read-only inspection such as status, log, show, diff, blame, branch -v, show-ref, rev-parse, for-each-ref, and merge-base is fine. Staging named files to inspect diff --cached, and a temporary stash around a tool that requires a clean tree, are also fine when the original state is put back afterward.

The rest

Do not use a broad add in a tree you did not clean; name the files you changed.
Do not initialize a repository inside vendored, build, data, or existing source-control trees.
Do not hand-edit generated files; change their source of truth.
Scratch repositories under a temporary directory are yours to experiment in.

Locks and corrupt state

A Git lock usually means another process is writing. Never kill the holder on your own initiative. Wait, inspect the holder read-only, use that tool's normal stop mechanism, or report the block. Never delete a lock without proving no live process owns it, and never respond to index corruption by deleting state and committing anyway.

Never commit or push while status reports changes you did not make and cannot explain.

If you already made an unwanted write

Say so plainly and stop. Do not attempt more history surgery without direction.