Summary: Cherry-pick and stash

The one-sentence definitions

Cherry-pick copies a single commit’s diff onto your current branch as a new commit. Stash saves your in-progress working tree changes so you can switch context cleanly.

Cherry-pick essentials

git cherry-pick abc1234, apply commit abc1234 to current branch as a new commit
git cherry-pick -x abc1234, add traceability line to the new commit message (recommended)
git cherry-pick --continue, after resolving conflicts
git cherry-pick --abort, give up, restore original state
git cherry-pick abc..def, range (exclusive of abc); use abc^..def to include abc

Right tool for: hotfix backports, forward-ports, salvage from abandoned branches. Wrong tool for: full branch merges, commits with subtle dependencies, branches that will merge anyway.

Stash essentials

git stash push -m "WIP descriptive message", save with a name
git stash list, see all stashes
git stash show -p stash@{0}, see the diff of a stash
git stash pop, apply most recent and remove from stack
git stash apply, apply most recent, keep on stack
git stash drop stash@{N}, remove a specific stash
git stash branch new-branch stash@{0}, create branch from where you were, apply stash there

Right tool for: short context switches (minutes to a few hours), branch swaps, quick experiments. Wrong tool for: multi-day pauses, hand-offs to teammates, high-value WIP. Commit to a branch instead.

The danger zones

Don’t cherry-pick the same commit twice onto the same branch, it creates duplicate commits.
Don’t use git stash clear casually, you may lose work.
Don’t let stashes pile up, visible in git stash list, easy to forget what’s in them.
Don’t treat stash as a backup, it’s local-only, not pushed, not visible to teammates.

Voice anchor

Git stores snapshots. Every other command is just navigating those snapshots.

Cherry-pick takes the diff between two snapshots and replays it. Stash packages a working-tree-vs-HEAD diff as a snapshot you can restore later. No magic.

What you carry into L12

L12 (Rebase, deeper) revisits rebase with a heavier focus on history cleanup: git rebase -i for interactive rebase, fixup and squash to combine related commits, and the line between safe rebases (local branches) and dangerous ones (published history). The cherry-pick mental model (copying commits to a new base) is the same engine that rebase uses under the hood, so L11 sets up L12.