Is there a good way to do this or are we subject to forcible diffing between the .zip/worked on code and a newly checked out, git remote connected repo?

In this tutorial, we will demonstrate how to create a private GitHub repository, then demonstrate how to securely clone and pull your code locally without the need to deal with fatal errors.

Cloning from GitHub basically requires you to get a web address to feed into the Git client. For this example, we're going to clone the Microsoft Visual Studio Code repo.