Summary: Rebase, deeper

The one-sentence definition

Interactive rebase replays a sequence of commits and lets you edit, combine, drop, or reorder them along the way, producing a new clean history in place of the original messy one.

The interactive rebase flow

git rebase -i HEAD~N      # interactive rebase of last N commits
# editor opens with todo list (oldest first)
# edit actions, save, close
# git replays each commit per the actions
# resolve conflicts if they happen (--continue, --skip, --abort)

The action keywords

• pick: replay as-is (default)
• reword: replay, edit the message
• squash: combine into previous, edit combined message
• fixup: combine into previous, discard this message
• drop: delete the commit
• edit: pause after replay so you can amend content
• exec: run a shell command (e.g. tests) at this step
• break: pause for any reason

The proactive fixup-and-autosquash flow

git commit --fixup=<sha>             # creates "fixup! <original-message>"
# ... continue work ...
git rebase -i --autosquash main      # pre-arranges fixup commits at cleanup

The hard rule

Don’t rebase published commits.

If you’ve pushed a commit to a shared branch and someone may have pulled it, do not rewrite it. Force-pushing rewritten history to main or any shared branch causes hours of recovery work and risks losing teammates’ commits.

Defenses:

• Branch protection on main forbids force-push entirely (platform setting; turn it on)
• git push --force-with-lease instead of --force on your own feature branches: checks that remote hasn’t advanced before overwriting
• Triple-check your branch before any force-push

Recovery toolkit

Situation	Move
Mid-rebase, want to give up	git rebase --abort
Already finished, want to undo	git reflog, then git reset --hard HEAD@{N}
Force-pushed wrong history to shared branch	Find someone with old history locally, force-push back, teammates reset
Stuck in a conflict storm	--abort, squash locally first (fewer conflicts), try again

Rebase vs merge (one-line summary)

Rebase when: local cleanup, linear history convention, integrating into a branch nobody else pulls from.

Merge when: branch is published and others pulled, want to preserve parallel-development story, long-lived release branches with audit-trail value.

Voice anchor

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

Rebase replays snapshots onto a new base, creating new snapshots. Interactive rebase lets you decide which to keep, combine, or drop. The reflog records every HEAD state for 90 days.

What you carry into Phase 4

Phase 4 (L13-L16) crosses into multi-agent territory: worktrees (L13), integration patterns for parallel agents (L14), AI-authored commits and PRs (L15), and the future of git in an AI-collaborative world (L16).