Story
Building-a-house world — same site and crew as every Phase 0 lesson.
You're the owner of a house being built. You keep the master plans as one paper drawing on your desk. You sketch changes, your partner scribbles in the margins. Fine — until you lose it. Gone. Or two crew members need to mark up the same wall plan at once. One version overwrites the other and nobody knows what the real plan is.
So instead you set up a site office at the construction site. The site office:
- Keeps the master plans safe in one shared place — not on your desk where the dog can eat them.
- Holds every past version of the plans. Changed the kitchen layout? The old version is still in the filing cabinet. Pull it out any time.
- Lets the whole crew — the foreman, the tradies, even the robot worker — check out the latest plans and mark up their section without clashing with each other.
That site office is GitHub. A folder on your Mac is the paper plan on your desk. GitHub is the site office that makes a whole crew possible.
The idea
GitHub is a cloud-based platform where you can store, share, and work together with others to write code.
source: docs.github.com/en/get-started/start-your-journey/about-github-and-git · fetched 2026-05-28
Three things make it different from Dropbox or Google Drive:
- It remembers every version forever. Every save (a commit) is permanent and searchable. You can go back to exactly how the project looked on any day.
- It supports parallel work without clashing. Git "intelligently tracks changes in files" — especially when multiple people modify the same files at the same time.
- It's the standard for software. Almost every open-source project and almost every company uses GitHub or something like it. Microsoft owns it.
source: docs.github.com/en/get-started/start-your-journey/about-github-and-git · fetched 2026-05-28
Git vs GitHub — one look
These get confused constantly. They are two different things:
| Git | GitHub | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A version-control system — the method of tracking changes | A website that hosts your Git history and adds collaboration tools |
| House analogy | The filing system inside the site office — how plans are logged and versioned | The site office itself — the building, the desk, the filing cabinet |
| Lives where | On your computer (a program you install) | In the cloud (github.com) |
| Relationship | Git is the engine | GitHub runs on top of Git and adds issues, PRs, Actions, audit logs |
One sentence: Git is the versioning method; GitHub is the hosted site office that runs Git and adds collaboration on top.
source: docs.github.com/en/get-started/start-your-journey/about-github-and-git · fetched 2026-05-28
Four terms to lock in
We use these every lesson from here. Don't memorize — just recognize.
- Repository (repo) — the project folder on GitHub. Has files + the full history of every change. Like the filing cabinet in the site office.
- Commit — one saved version. A snapshot of the project at one moment, with a message explaining what changed. Like one page added to the build diary.
- Account — your personal login on github.com. You need one to do anything.
- Organization (org) — a shared workspace for a team or company. Repos can live under a person or under an org (think: a company's site office vs your personal one).
Real example — your own project
Your card-table project lives at:
→ github.com/Vishal3698/MindiKot
That URL breaks down as:
github.com— the website (the site office network)Vishal3698— your account (your name on the door)MindiKot— the repository (this project's filing cabinet)
Open it and you'll see:
- A list of files — the plans
- A "commits" counter: how many saves exist in the diary
- Tabs at the top: Code · Issues · Pull requests · Actions · Settings
Those tabs are the surfaces GH-600 tests hardest. The whole cert is about AI agents that make commits, open pull requests, and trigger actions in repos like this one. Understand the repo first — agents work inside it.
Optional — explore your own repo (5 min)
The best "what is GitHub" exercise is looking at a real repo you already own. Five minutes, no commitment.
github.com/Vishal3698/MindiKot- Open the link above. Look at the file list. Click any file to see how GitHub renders code.
- Click the commits counter near the top. Scroll the history — each row is one save.
- Click any commit row to see exactly what changed (green = added, red = removed).
- Click the Issues tab, then Pull requests, then Actions. Just to see they exist — we cover each in later lessons.
Relevance
Knowing GitHub → Exam: MED · Day-to-day: HIGH. The exam won't ask "what is a repo?" in isolation — it assumes you know and tests what agents do inside repos (commits, PRs, Actions, audit logs). But if you're fuzzy on the basics, every later question blurs. Day-to-day as a developer: you live in GitHub. This foundation is worth truly understanding even though the exam doesn't test it directly.
Check-in — three quick questions
Open-ended. Think first, then peek at the suggested answer to compare.
-
In one sentence — what does GitHub do that a folder on your Mac can't?
Suggested answer
GitHub keeps every version of every file forever, lets multiple people work on the same files simultaneously without overwriting each other, and adds collaboration tools (issues, PRs, Actions, audit log) — a Mac folder just has whatever was last saved by whoever hit Save last.
-
What's the difference between Git and GitHub?
Suggested answer
Git is the version-control system — a program you install locally that tracks changes. GitHub is a cloud website that uses Git under the hood and wraps it with collaboration tools (issues, pull requests, CI/CD, permissions). Git = the filing method; GitHub = the site office built around it.
-
Why does the GH-600 exam care that you understand GitHub before you understand agents?
Suggested answer
Because agents in the cert do their work inside GitHub — they open issues, write commits, push branches, open pull requests, trigger Actions, and leave audit-log entries. If you don't know what those things are, agent behavior is invisible. Every exam domain assumes this foundation.
Mentor marks this lesson verified after you compare your answers and say "got it" in chat.
Ticks this lesson done on the home roadmap. Saved in this browser.
Sources: docs.github.com — About GitHub and Git · fetched 2026-05-28.