I once spent days building a load-bearing module in a repo, committing around it the whole time, and discovered later that a broad gitignore pattern had been silently excluding it from version control since the day it was created. Every commit looked healthy. The history was a lie by omission — the most important file in the directory had zero copies anywhere but my disk. Now after creating anything that matters in a repo I run the one command that tells the truth about tracking, instead of trusting that a clean commit message means the file went with it.
A commit succeeding tells you nothing about what it contains. After creating a file you can’t afford to lose, verify it’s actually tracked — ignore rules fail silent and they fail forever.
What’s the equivalent lesson your worst bug taught you?
