Oh Shit, Git?! — Rescue Recipes in Plain English

Git is hard: screwing up is easy, and figuring out how to fix your mistakes can feel impossible.

The docs have a chicken-and-egg problem—you cannot search for how to get out of a mess unless you already know the name of the thing you need. So you stare at git help and close the tab.

This post is the opposite: bad situations in plain English, then the commands that fixed them for me.

Inspired by the legendary Oh Shit, Git!?! (hat tip to Katie Sylor-Miller and everyone who contributed). I adapted and organized the flows I actually use on real repos.

Oh shit, I did something terribly wrong — does Git have a time machine?

Yes. It is called reflog.

git reflog
# You will see everything you've done in Git, across all branches.
# Each entry has an index: HEAD@{index}
# Find the one from BEFORE you broke everything.

git reset HEAD@{index}
# Magic time machine

Use this to recover deleted work, undo a bad merge attempt, or go back to when things actually worked. I use reflog constantly.

Oh shit, I committed and immediately need one small change

You committed, ran tests, and realized you forgot a space. Again.

# Make your change, then:
git add .
# or: git add path/to/file

git commit --amend --no-edit
# Your last commit now includes that change

Faster than an interactive rebase for a one-line fix.

Oh shit, I need to change the message on my last commit

git commit --amend
# Follow the prompts to change the message

Stupidly strict commit message rules? Fixed in thirty seconds.

Oh shit, I committed to main but it should have been a new branch

# Create a branch from current state (keeps your commit)
git branch some-new-branch-name

# Remove the last commit from main
git reset HEAD~ --hard

# Switch to the branch where the commit now lives
git checkout some-new-branch-name

Your work is on some-new-branch-name. main is clean again.

Note: If you already pushed to a shared main, this gets painful—you may need git reset HEAD@{n} from reflog instead of HEAD~. If you tried other fixes first, the index number changes. Reflog is your friend.

Oh shit, I committed to the wrong branch

Option A: reset, stash, move

git reset HEAD~ --soft
git stash

git checkout name-of-the-correct-branch
git stash pop

git add .
git commit -m "Your message here"

Option B: cherry-pick

git checkout name-of-the-correct-branch
git cherry-pick wrong-branch-name

git checkout wrong-branch-name
git reset HEAD~ --hard

Pick whichever matches how your brain works. I use stash more; cherry-pick is cleaner when the commit is already perfect.

Oh shit, I ran git diff and nothing showed up

You changed files, but git diff is empty because you already staged everything.

git diff --staged

Yes, it is a feature. No, it is not obvious the first time. File under ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Oh shit, I need to undo a commit from five commits ago

You do not have to manually copy old file contents. Revert creates a new commit that undoes an old one.

git log
# Arrow keys to scroll; copy the hash of the commit to undo

git revert <saved-hash>
# Git opens an editor for the revert message — save and exit

Safe for shared branches because it does not rewrite history—it adds a new “undo” commit on top.

Oh shit, I need to undo changes to one file

git log
# Find a commit from BEFORE the file broke; copy its hash

git checkout <saved-hash> -- path/to/file
# Old version is now staged

git commit -m "Restore file to known-good version"

When I finally learned this, it felt huge. On what planet is checkout -- the intuitive “undo file” command? Still: it works.

Oh shit, I give up — nuclear option

cd ..
sudo rm -r fucking-git-repo-dir
git clone https://some.github.url/fucking-git-repo-dir.git
cd fucking-git-repo-dir

Thanks to Eric V. for the joke. (All complaints about sudo in a Git blog post can go to him.)

The actually-approved nuclear reset

If your branch is so broken you need to match the remote exactly—destructive, unrecoverable locally:

git fetch origin
git checkout main
git reset --hard origin/main

# Remove untracked files and directories
git clean -d --force

# Repeat checkout / reset / clean for each broken branch

Quick reference

Disclaimer

This is not exhaustive Git documentation. There are purer, more theoretical ways to do almost everything here—I arrived at these through trial and error, swearing, and table-flipping.

Take what helps. When in doubt, reflog first, ask second, reset --hard last.

If you want the long-form “build Git from scratch” mental model, check out Build Your Own Git From Scratch. If you want collaboration workflows, see Git & GitHub from Zero to Collaborating.