🔁 How I Rewound My Git Branch to Start Fresh (and Why You Might Too)

During development, it’s common to try different things, commit frequently, and end up with a branch history that feels messy or bloated. Recently, while working on a feature branch for my-ticket-2025, I found myself wanting a clean slate—but without deleting everything. Here's how I surgically rewound my Git history and started fresh from a specific point.

🧠 The Scenario

I was working on a branch named feat/my-ticket-2025. Here's a simplified view of the commit history:

a1b2c3d chore: update test - bff      ← most recent
d4e5f6g chore: remove visa-related code
h7i8j9k chore: add docs               ← I want to restart from here
z1x2c3v chore: update package-lock

After reflecting, I realized everything after chore: add docs was experimental or unneeded. So, I decided to reset my branch to that specific commit, wiping the newer ones entirely.

🔨 The Goal

Reset the branch to the chore: add docs commit as if the newer ones never happened.

⚙️ The Command That Did It

First, I located the commit hash for chore: add docs:

git log --oneline

Then I executed:

git reset --hard h7i8j9k

Replace h7i8j9k with the actual commit hash from your log.

This erased everything after that commit — including local changes.

To update the remote branch and overwrite its history:

git push origin feat/my-ticket-2025 --force

⚠️ A Word of Caution

Using --hard and --force is powerful, but dangerous:

• Use --hard only if you're okay losing local changes.
• Use --force only when you're sure others aren't working on the branch, or coordinate with your team first.

For safety, you can always create a backup branch before the reset:

git branch backup/my-ticket-2025

✅ Clean Slate, Happy Dev

After the reset, my branch had a clean history. I could now recommit only what truly mattered moving forward.

If you ever feel like your Git history has spiraled out of control — you can always pause, rewind, and restart. That’s the beauty of version control.

✍️ Have you used git reset --hard before? Any horror stories or productivity wins? Drop them in the comments!