You watched the clock tick while waiting for the fix, knowing the real problem wasn’t the code. It was the Git checkout feedback loop grinding your team’s flow into dust.
Every commit should make progress. Every branch switch should be fast, predictable, and invisible. Instead, developers sit idle during long checkout times, lost in context switches, losing track of what they were doing. Multiply that wasted time across a team and the feedback loop becomes a bottleneck that moves slower than the product itself.
The Git checkout feedback loop isn’t just about disk I/O or network latency. It’s about the time between writing code, testing it, and seeing the result. If that loop grows too long, bugs hide longer, merges get messier, and confidence drops. Changes pile up instead of moving forward, creating friction that spreads to planning, QA, and release schedules.