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?

Developers can bring all the code from a remote Git-based repository to a local machine, or anywhere else. Follow along with these three easy steps with the git clone command to move code from one ...

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.