Upstream tracking branches establish relationships between local and remote branches, enabling simplified push and pull commands without specifying remote and branch names. As the creator of CoreUI, a widely used open-source UI library, I’ve streamlined Git workflows for development teams throughout my 25 years of development experience. The most convenient approach is using git push -u during first push or git branch –set-upstream-to for existing branches. This method provides automatic remote tracking, eliminates repetitive command arguments, and enables status checking showing ahead/behind commit counts relative to remote.