Because IMO struggling and learning "the hard way" first forces people to understand what is actually happening at the git level before using fancy tools like t

Because IMO struggling and learning "the hard way" first forces people to understand what is actually happening at the git level before using fancy tools like this or Tower to e.g. rebase master or otherwise do complicated unnecessary things because the tool makes them easy to do and "it seemed like the right thing". There are a lot of ways to do git. If you frequently find yourself needing a GUI tool to do more than compare diffs (there are a few good ones out there), it's very possible that the way you / your team are using git could itself use some work. If you're very new to git on teams or even if you're more intermediate, https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/comparing-workflows/centralized-workflow https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/comparing-workflows/... is probably worth a read to understand how this stuff can work nicely for projects. It really shouldn't be rocket surgery to cut a new release :)