How to Stop Feeling Lost in Unfamiliar Codebases Using Git

You just cloned a repo. Maybe you joined a new team, maybe you're reviewing a PR from an open-source contributor, or maybe you're debugging something in a service you haven't touched in six months. The instinct is to open the project in your editor and start reading files. Don't do that yet. I used to dive straight into src/ and try to build a mental map by reading code top-down. It's slow, it's overwhelming, and you miss the story of how the code got to its current state. These days, I run a handful of git commands first, and it saves me a ridiculous amount of time. The Problem: Code Without Context Is Just Text Reading code without understanding its history is like walking into a movie halfway through. You can see what's on screen, but you don't know why anyone is doing what they're doing. Why is there a weird adapter pattern in the database layer? Why are there three different HTTP clients? Why does this function have seventeen parameters? The answers are almost always in the git hi