Compare Against Authoritative Main

When a branch is stale, the important question is not ‘what do I remember changing?’ It is ‘what differs from the current authoritative branch, and which side already contains the intended work?’

Fetch or otherwise verify the comparison base, inspect changed files, and classify each difference as local work, upstream work, conflict, or unrelated churn. Do not create a duplicate implementation because a local branch is behind.

This is a small discipline with a large payoff: it preserves provenance and makes merge, review, and release decisions easier to audit.