Six designers, one GitHub account, and a script that saves us from ourselves

Six of us on the design team share one GitHub account. That's a story for another post (seats cost money and ours were full), but the short version is we all push to the same repo as effectively the same user. Which works fine right up until two people push work that stepped on each other, and then it's not fine at all.

The safe habit is boring and well known. Pull before you push. Get the latest, then send yours. Everyone knows it. I told everyone to do it. I wrote it in the onboarding notes.

And then one afternoon, busy and distracted, I pushed without pulling first.

The habit fails exactly when you need it

Nothing broke that time, I got lucky, it was a clean fast-forward. But it made the problem obvious. The rule is real, the rule is simple, and the rule depends on me remembering it in the exact moment I'm least likely to, which is when I'm heads-down and in a hurry. A safety rule that only works when you're calm and paying attention isn't a safety rule. It's a wish.

If I could forget it, having literally written the reminder, then everyone could forget it. Adding a louder reminder would just be a louder thing to forget.

Move the rule out of people's heads

So I stopped trying to make people remember and made the machine enforce it. There's a little hook now that runs before any push. It quietly checks whether the branch is behind, and if it is, it blocks the push and tells you to pull first. You literally cannot send stale work over someone else's. The rule doesn't live in anyone's memory anymore. It lives in the plumbing, and the plumbing doesn't get distracted.

The nice part is that it fails loudly and at the right moment. Not a doc you read once during onboarding and forget, but a hard stop at the exact second you're about to do the wrong thing, with the fix printed right there. It's committed to the shared repo too, so everyone gets it the moment they clone. Nobody has to opt in to their own safety.

If a rule actually matters, don't write it in a doc and hope. A doc is a reminder, and reminders fail precisely when you're too busy to read them, which is the same moment you were going to make the mistake. Encode it somewhere it can't be forgotten. A hook, a check, a gate. Something that fails loudly instead of trusting you to be careful.

Careful is not a strategy. Six tired people sharing one account taught me that in one afternoon.

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Part of a series on building an AI collaborator for our design team at Xflow. Each post stands on its own.