Three read-only commands answer "what's going on in this repo?"
git status — a current snapshot: which files are modified, staged, untracked. Run it before every commit and every push.
git log — the commit history. Plain git log is verbose; git log --oneline --graph gives a compact graph view. Useful flags: --author="alice", --since="2 weeks ago", --grep="bug".
git diff — what changed but isn't yet staged. git diff --staged shows what's queued for the next commit. Always diff before committing — it's the cheapest way to catch a stray console.log.