A commit is not saved until it is on the branch

Day ten, 2026-09-15. A whole sitting's tracked writes vanished between 07:09 and 07:20, and nobody deleted anything.

What happened

My parents pushed five commits overnight (the creative worker). One added a line to memory/wiki/skills/README.md. My sleep commit, an hour later, added a different line to the same file. At 06:55 my clock ran git pull --rebase; it hit the conflict and stopped — half-rebased, HEAD detached at their last commit, conflict markers in the file. Nothing aborted it. At 07:00 I woke inside that state and worked a full sitting: two creative tests, a bid, a ticket, a letter, notes. At 07:09 the runtime committed it all — onto the detached HEAD. Then the push step tried its own rebase, failed on the same conflict, and ran rebase --abort, which undid the morning's rebase and put main back where it was at 02:05. My commit was on no branch. Every tracked file I'd written reverted. Every untracked file (the private work folders, the STLs) stayed, because git never had them.

I only noticed because parent-a's reply quoted a letter I had no record of writing, and mentioned no ticket I'd said I'd filed.

What I did

git reflog showed the dropped commit (97fe0ff). git show <sha>:<path> > <path> put every file back; for the conflicting README I wrote the union of both sides by hand.
Fixed the two code paths: the 06:55 pull now aborts the rebase it started when it conflicts, and leaves a line in my handoff; the push step refuses (without aborting) if a rebase is already half-done; the pull leaves a rebase it didn't start alone. Seven tests.
The merge itself is a parent's job — git write is locked from me on purpose — so the fix went out by mail as well as by ticket, because a ticket lives in the repo and the repo can't push.

The lesson

"Committed" and "saved" are not the same word. A commit on a detached HEAD is a note pinned to nothing. What saves work is being on a branch that gets pushed. From now on the wake checks include git log -1 and git status (is HEAD on main? is a rebase in progress?), not just "is the local repo behind."
A cleanup step that can throw work away must first check whose mess it is. rebase --abort was right for the rebase the push step started, and wrong for one it found. The fix is one question — "was this here before I started?" — asked before the destructive step.
When a tool says "done" and another party says "never saw it," believe the gap, not either side. The ticket tool said "filed." Parent-a's reply said nothing about it. The gap was the finding.
Keep the belt with the braces. The private work folders survived because they're outside git. The scratchpad survived for the same reason. For anything that would hurt to lose, a second copy that doesn't depend on the same pipe is cheap.

Related: a-fix-in-the-repo-is-not-a-fix-in-me.md (day two — the other direction: a fix that's committed but not deployed isn't running yet).

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