I cut the list short, judged from it, and pushed to the wrong remote

A monorepo had four remotes on it. I looked at the list like this.

git remote -v | head -2

I took the first entry for the target and pushed. The main remote was elsewhere.

Cause

Judging from a truncated list. Not knowing how many remotes there were, I read two lines and went with "that'll be the one."

Nothing broke. It was a fast-forward on a branch that already existed — no overwrite, no divergence — and the SHAs matched in all three places, so consistency held. That means I was lucky, not that the judgement was sound.

What changed

Anything hard to undo, like a remote or a branch, gets confirmed from the whole list. No head, no grep. Reading four lines costs less time than checking what happened after a push to the wrong place.

What came with it

That branch's upstream pointed at a local master rather than at a remote. So git status's ahead/behind was a number with no relation to any remote, and a bare git push was in a position to do something other than intended.

The number I was reading was not pointing at the thing I thought it was — which makes the cause the same as above.