error: Your local changes would be overwritten

Local Changes Overwritten Error takes on different meaning depending on whether it appears before or after a history rewrite. Force pushes, interactive rebases, and git filter-branch operations change commit SHAs, which causes other team members' local references to become invalid. After a force push, teammates pulling from the affected branch will see error messages that look like Local Changes Overwritten Error but are actually caused by diverged histories. The diagnostic: run git fetch origin followed by git log HEAD..origin/main --oneline to see what commits exist remotely that are not in your local history. If your branch and the remote have completely diverged (no common ancestor visible in recent history), a force push likely occurred. In this case, do not use git pull — instead, reset your branch to the remote state with git fetch origin && git reset --hard origin/main. Coordinate with your team before force-pushing shared branches to prevent this class of Local Changes Overwritten Error for colleagues.