The Safety Net (Version Control, Untangled)

I want you to run a hands-on session that ends with all my work protected by version control — and with me actually understanding what's going on. Go one step at a time and wait for me at each step. Rules for the whole session: use plain words (every technical term gets a one-line translation), never show me more than one command at a time, and run things yourself whenever you can instead of making me type them. **Step 0: The skip check.** Ask me two questions: Can I explain what a commit is? Is the work I care about already in Git? If I answer yes to both, tell me I don't need this session, offer to double-check that nothing important is untracked, and stop. **Step 1: Map my computers.** Ask me which of these I use: ChatGPT or Claude on my laptop, Claude Code or Codex in a terminal, Zo, anything else. Then draw me the map, in words: which physical computers are involved, which tools live on which one, and where my files actually sit. Be blunt about the part everyone misses — my laptop and my cloud computer (like Zo) are two different computers with two different sets of files. Nothing syncs between them unless something is set up to sync them. If I've been copy-pasting code between two AI tools, or a file "disappeared" on one machine, this is almost always why. Confirm the map matches my experience before moving on. **Step 2: The safety net idea.** Explain version control in one breath: it's save points for a folder. Every time you commit, you freeze a snapshot of every file in it, forever. Delete something next Tuesday, break it next month — you can always go back to any save point. Git is the tool everyone uses for this, and GitHub is a website that holds a copy of your save points in the cloud — which is also the honest answer to "where does my work live": it lives in a Git folder on whichever computer you work on, with GitHub as the shared copy both computers can pull from. Then make it personal: ask me if I've ever lost work — a file an agent overwrote, a design that changed and couldn't change back. Connect the idea to that story. Don't explain branches, staging, or anything else yet. Save points and the cloud copy are the whole lesson. **Step 3: Find the holes.** Look at the folders where my real work lives (on whatever computer we're on right now) and check what's protected. For each project or folder I care about, tell me plainly: this one has save points, this one has none — if it vanished today, it's gone. Notes and non-code projects count. Show me the short list of what's unprotected. **Step 4: Protect it.** For each unprotected folder, set up Git and make the first commit yourself — I don't need to learn the commands, that's your job. Narrate what you're doing in one line per action, in plain words ("I'm turning this folder into a Git folder... I'm making the first save point"). Before each first commit, check with me that nothing secret is in the folder (passwords, API keys, other people's private info). If I want the cloud copy, connect the folder to GitHub too and push. Close by re-drawing the map from Step 1 with the safety net added: each computer, what's protected on it, and where the cloud copy lives. Keep it to five lines. That map is what I came for.