The most dangerous moment in an AI-coding session isn't when the model refuses to help. It's when it says "fixed!" and the thing is subtly broken — and you can't undo it because there's no history to go back to.
This guide is for people building real things with Claude Code, Cursor, ChatGPT, or Replit, who haven't come up through traditional software engineering. You don't need to learn to code to use it. You need the small number of habits that keep your work safe, your secrets off the internet, and your setup reproducible the next time the AI sits down at the keyboard.
Inside you'll find 7 principles covering:
Before we get into the habits, two quick definitions, because the rest of this guide uses both words and they're not the same thing.
Git is a program that lives on your computer. It tracks every change you make to a folder, so you can go backwards in time whenever you need to. The name isn't an acronym — Linus Torvalds, who built it for the Linux kernel back in 2005, famously named it after British slang for an unpleasant person, mostly as a joke. You don't need to care about the name. You need to know it's the engine underneath everything that follows.
GitHub is a website. It stores copies of your Git history in the cloud, adds a social layer on top (issues, pull requests, collaboration), and is where most of the open-source code in the world currently lives. It's owned by Microsoft, and it's free for most solo use. Alternatives exist — GitLab, Codeberg, Bitbucket — and for what this guide covers they're interchangeable.
The short version. Git is the version-control tool. GitHub is one of several places to park copies of your Git history so it's not only on your laptop. You use Git locally every day. GitHub is optional but worth it for the off-site backup alone.
The pieces that informed this guide, ordered roughly easiest → most opinionated:
Made with ❤️ in Valencia by Jim Christian. For feedback, please reach out to [email protected].
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