git-for-everyone

A Claude Code skill that helps total beginners — including people who have never opened a terminal before — use git and GitHub safely and confidently.

If you've ever felt lost in front of a fatal: not a git repository error, or weren't sure whether git reset --hard was about to delete a week of work, this skill is for you. It teaches Claude to:

• Translate plain English into the right command. Say "save my work" and Claude figures out you mean git add + git commit.
• Explain concepts with everyday analogies. A commit is a saved game. A branch is a parallel timeline. A pull request is "hey, can you take a look at my changes?"
• Stop before anything destructive. Before git reset --hard, git push --force, deleting a branch with unmerged work, or anything else that could lose data, Claude pauses, explains in plain English what would be lost, and asks before going ahead.
• Translate scary errors into kindness. No more parroting back fatal: refusing to merge unrelated histories — Claude tells you what it actually means and what to do next.
• Walk you through GitHub. Signing in (gh auth login), cloning, pushing a folder to a brand-new repo, opening pull requests, forking, opening issues.
• Celebrate the small wins. Your first commit, your first push, your first PR — these are real milestones.

The skill triggers automatically. You don't have to know it's there. Just talk to Claude in plain English about your code and git stuff and it kicks in.

Install

With npx skills add

npx skills add sunfmin/git-for-everyone

That's it. Open Claude Code in any project and start asking git questions in plain English.

Manually

Clone the repo into your Claude skills folder:

git clone https://github.com/sunfmin/git-for-everyone.git ~/.claude/skills/git-for-everyone

Or symlink it if you want to hack on the skill:

git clone https://github.com/sunfmin/git-for-everyone.git
ln -s "$(pwd)/git-for-everyone" ~/.claude/skills/git-for-everyone

Try it

Open Claude Code in any folder and try saying things like:

• "How do I save my work?"
• "I want to put this project on GitHub."
• "My teammate pushed something — how do I get it?"
• "I think I broke something."
• "What's a branch?"
• "How do I undo my last commit?"
• "I'm getting fatal: refusing to merge unrelated histories — what does that mean?"

You don't need to mention git or GitHub by name. The skill picks up on intent.

What's inside

git-for-everyone/
├── SKILL.md                          The brain — when to do what
└── references/
    ├── glossary.md                   Every term in plain English
    ├── recipes.md                    "I want to do X" walkthroughs
    ├── safety-net.md                 Destructive commands and safer alternatives
    ├── error-translations.md         Scary git errors → plain English
    └── github-flows.md               gh auth, cloning, PRs, forks, issues

SKILL.md is concise — it's the decision-making layer. The reference files are loaded on demand when the situation calls for them, so the skill scales without bloating Claude's context.

Design principles

1. Narrate before acting. Every git or gh command is explained in plain English in one short sentence before it runs. Silent commands teach nothing.
2. Lead with the analogy, then the term. "Think of a commit as a saved game — the technical name for it is a 'commit.'" Never jargon-first.
3. Stop before destructive commands. Force pushes, hard resets, branch deletions with unmerged work — all require an explicit confirmation after the user has heard, in plain English, what could be lost. Default to the gentler tool (git revert over git reset --hard, git stash over discarding edits).
4. Translate, don't parrot. Scary git output gets converted to plain English before anything else happens.
5. Celebrate the firsts. First commit, first push, first PR, first conflict resolved — these are real milestones and worth a moment.
6. Never make anyone feel dumb. "What's a branch?" is exactly the right question to ask.

Contributing

If you've used this skill and found a moment where it stumbled — a recipe missing, an error message it didn't translate well, an analogy that didn't land — please open an issue or PR. The whole point is to make this gentle for newcomers, and you might catch what others miss.

License

MIT.