What to know: you have data on your computer now. Configuration, notes, work the AI has written. The question is: what happens if something happens to it?
Two things can go wrong.
The AI deletes or changes something by accident. You want to go back to what it was before.
Your hard disk dies, or the computer is lost, and everything on it goes with it.
Git solves the first one. A backup solves the second. Git first.
Git. Git is a tool that tracks every change to every file. You install it once. When you commit, it saves a snapshot of everything as it is right now. If something goes wrong, you have a way to look back and restore to a previously committed checkpoint. Think of it like a shared document or a wiki page that keeps a history of every edit. The AI can manage this for you: tell it to commit after each piece of work, and when you need to go back, it knows how.
You do not need to learn Git. You need to know three things: a commit saves where things are, going back to a commit undoes what happened after it, and the AI knows how to do both. The first step is installing it, and the AI can do that too.
GitHub. Git on its own lives on your machine. If the machine is gone, so is the history. GitHub is a copy of your history on the internet. Once it is set up, the AI pushes each commit there, and your history survives anything that happens to the computer.
Signing up and connecting it is the kind of thing Claude with a browser can get you eighty percent of the way through. The AI walks the sign-up, creates the repository, connects it, and from then on pushes when you commit.
Author's practice: everything the AI touches is in a git repository. Commits happen often. The repository is pushed to GitHub. Losing a file or a bad change is a one-line fix, not a disaster.
Reveal on the spot: say whether this directory is a git repository. If it is, say when the last commit was and whether there are uncommitted changes. If it is not, say so, and offer to set it up now. Say whether a remote like GitHub is connected.
Unlocks: the freedom to let the AI change things, knowing that nothing it does is permanent.