How to Recover from a Corrupted Git Repository

There's a special kind of dread that hits when you run git status and get back something like fatal: bad object HEAD or error: object file is empty. Your stomach drops. Your commit history — weeks of work — feels like it just vanished. I've been there three times in eight years. Twice from disk failures, once from a VM that got killed mid-push. Every time, I thought I'd lost everything. Every time, I was wrong. Git is surprisingly resilient, and most "corrupted" repos are fully recoverable if yo