Git Workflow

Merge preserves full history including the branch structure (a merge commit with two parents); rebase replays your commits on top of the target branch, producing linear history but rewriting commit hashes — never rebase commits that have already been pushed and could be in someone else's history.

Cherry-pick applies one specific commit from elsewhere onto your current branch — useful for hotfixes that need to land on both a release branch and main.

A reasonable position to state out loud: feature branches rebase onto main before opening a PR (clean, linear history for review), and the merge into main itself uses a merge commit or squash-merge depending on team convention.