Sync

Bring the local repository in line with its remote, and say plainly what did not line up.

Read shared/git.md first. Base resolution, force-push rules, and what "merged" means after a rebase all live there.

This skill only fast-forwards. Where a branch has diverged it reports and stops — choosing between rebase, merge, and reset is the user's call, and guessing it destroys work.

1. Fetch

git fetch --all --prune --tags

--prune deletes remote-tracking refs whose upstream is gone. It touches no local branch and no file.

It does not prune tags, and --prune-tags is deliberately not passed: that flag deletes every local tag the remote does not carry, including one made by hand five minutes ago, and a tag is sometimes the only thing keeping a commit reachable. A stale tag costs nothing. The alternative discards work, which is the one thing this skill never does.

git fetch writes what it did to stderr, not stdout — capture it. The fetched line in the final report counts those lines, and a run that discards the output has nothing left to count. Lines opening - [deleted] are the pruned refs; * [new tag] are the tags.