Rewritten history is the git equivalent of a locked room being opened from the inside: nothing in the working tree looks wrong, but the record of what happened has been changed. Force-pushes, in particular, are the mechanism by which a history rewrite reaches the remote, and a repository with an audit culture needs to know when they happen and what they did. gitpulse's branch comparison and commit-pattern views are the instruments for that audit, and this article is the method, step by step, with the exact commands and the exact output shapes to look for.
Step one: establish the baseline — the normal branch ratio and commit shape for the repository, from a period you trust, because the deviation is only visible against a baseline. Step two: look for the deviations — a branch whose history depth does not match its age, a commit pattern that breaks the repository's rhythm, a direct-push spike on a branch that is normally reviewed. Step three: for each deviation, the follow-up is the reflog and a log comparison between the branch and its upstream, which is where the rewrite shows up as missing or duplicated commits, and the shape of the missing commits is the fingerprint of the rewrite. The analytics find the candidates; the git commands confirm them. The habit is the weekly pass, and the article is the pass: the baseline, the scan, the confirmation, and the note you write when the confirmation comes back clean, because the clean note is the audit trail that proves the pass happened.
