I found that the above answer to the question by Ruslan did not work (2013?) anymore. I did not have a command to:

git branch -M main

which I did after the commit.

Also, they failed once I had that branch command because when I created the repo it had conflicting README.md and LICENSE.

My solution was to:

1. Delete the repo as defined above on github and create a new one WITHOUT README.md and LICENSE.
2. Locally I deleted the .git file in the root directory (NOTE: it is not visible on Visual Studio Code on windows the way I have it configured). From CLI (within Visual Studio Code) I ran: git init git remote add origin THE_REPO_URL git add . git commit -m "Initial commit" git branch -M main git push -u origin main

One warning: Do not create the README.md or LICENSE on the cloud repo. If you do, you will have to resolve the fact that the repo has files that are not reconciled with the local files. Create the new repo without these files or you will have to do the reconciliation of these files.