Fetching changes from remote repositories is essential for staying updated with team contributions while maintaining control over when changes are integrated into your local branches. As the creator of CoreUI, a widely used open-source UI library, I regularly fetch changes from contributors worldwide to review updates, plan releases, and coordinate development across distributed teams. From my expertise, the most safe approach is to use git fetch before merging or pulling. This method downloads remote changes without automatically merging them, allowing you to review updates and resolve conflicts deliberately.