@jannem @b0rk Came here to say that, essentially. My mental model is that there is no fundamental difference between HEAD, branches and tags – all are refs, fancy names for human navigation, which are pointing to a commit. Git uses HEAD to keep track of where I am, meaning which commit my working directory should be compared to and any new commit should reference as its parent. If I came to the current HEAD by checking out a branch, that branch ref is now also being updated to point the new commit, while tags always remain where they point to.