The Time Machine You Didn't Know You Needed

Narrated

You’ve been building your trip planner. Adding features, tweaking the layout, changing how the AI responds. It’s going well. You’re feeling confident.

Then you make a change. Maybe you try to add a new section. Maybe you rearrange how the page looks. Maybe you just edit one line you didn’t fully understand.

And the app breaks. Completely. White screen. Nothing works.

You stare at the code. You don’t know what you changed. You definitely don’t remember what it looked like before. You have no way to get back to the version that worked five minutes ago. The only option is to start over, or spend an hour asking Claude Code to guess what went wrong.

This is one of the most common walls in software development. It doesn’t matter if you’re a beginner or a twenty-year veteran. If you don’t have a way to save your progress and go back in time, you will eventually lose work. It’s not a question of if — it’s a question of when.

Professional developers solved this problem decades ago with a tool called Git. Git is a time machine for your code. Every time you save a checkpoint, Git remembers exactly what every file looked like at that moment. You can jump back to any checkpoint, compare what changed between two checkpoints, or undo a mistake without losing everything else.

And there’s a companion called GitHub — think of it like Google Drive for code. Git saves checkpoints on your computer. GitHub saves a copy in the cloud so you don’t lose everything if your laptop dies, and so you can share your project with other people.

Every single professional software project in the world uses Git. Every one. It’s not optional. And after this lesson, you’ll understand why.