What Is Version Control and Why Should Every Developer Use Git

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Version control is a system that tracks changes to files over time, allowing you to see every modification made, who made it, when, and why, and to revert to any previous state if something goes wrong. For software development it is as fundamental as saving your work, but far more powerful because it saves the entire history of your work rather than just the current state.

Git is the dominant version control system used by the overwhelming majority of software projects in 2026. Created by Linus Torvalds in 2005 to manage the Linux kernel, it is distributed rather than centralised, meaning every developer has a complete copy of the repository history rather than depending on a central server. GitHub, GitLab and Bitbucket are services built on top of Git that add collaboration features, issue tracking, code review workflows and CI/CD pipeline integration.

The core concepts to understand are commits, branches and merges. A commit is a snapshot of your code at a specific moment, accompanied by a message explaining what changed and why. A branch is a separate line of development that diverges from the main codebase, allowing you to work on a feature or fix without affecting the main code until it is ready. A merge brings branches back together. The workflow this enables, develop a feature in isolation, test it, review it, then merge it, is the foundation of almost all professional software development.

For AI-assisted development in 2026 Git has become even more important, not less, because AI coding tools generate large amounts of code quickly and the ability to review exactly what changed, revert to a known good state when an AI-generated change introduced a bug, and track which changes came from AI assistance versus human decisions, all require robust version control. The Miasma supply chain attack was possible partly because the malicious commit was a small change in a large repository, which underlines why reviewing commits carefully before incorporating them matters.