Q: You ran `git push --force` to your feature branch but realized you wiped out a teammate's commit they had pushed five minutes earlier. How do you recover their commit, and how do you prevent this next time?

The commit isn't lost on the remote yet — it's still in the remote's reflog and likely in your teammate's local repo. Recovery:

• Ask the teammate — their local branch still has the commit. They can push it back (after pulling your changes and rebasing it on top), or share the hash.
• Check the remote's reflog if you have shell access to the server (rare on managed services). On GitHub, the events API and "Network" graph sometimes still show the dangling commit hash for a while; you can fetch it directly: git fetch origin .
• Check your own clone — if you fetched their commit before force-pushing, git reflog on the remote-tracking branch (git reflog show origin/feature-x) will list it. Cherry-pick it back: git cherry-pick then push.
• Use git push --force-with-lease instead of --force. It refuses to push if the remote has commits you haven't seen — exactly this scenario.

Prevention:

• Better: git push --force-if-includes (Git 2.30+) — also verifies your local ref includes the latest fetch.
• Branch protection rules on main/develop should block force-push entirely. Force-push should only be allowed (and only via --force-with-lease) on personal feature branches.