Yeah learned this the hard way.
this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2025
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As long as you never touch the rebase button, you'll be fine. Probably.
... and force push.
If you ever find yourself in a situation where rebase or a force push seems to be the solution, take a step back, clone your repo in a new directory and copy the changes into you're new checkout - 'cause you gon' and screwed somethin' up, son.
I rebase and force push daily. I like squashing all my commits, and our main branch moves quickly so I rebase off that often. Zero issues for me.
Same. And even if you were to fuck up, have people never heard of the
reflog...?Every job I've worked at it's been the expectation to regularly rebase your feature branch on main, to squash your commits (and then force push, obv), and for most projects to do rebase-merges of PRs rather than creating merge commits. Even the, uh, less gifted developers never had an issue with this.
I think people just hear the meme about git being hard somewhere and then use that as an excuse to never learn.
Why would you want to squash? Feels weird to willingly give up history granularity...
Because a commit should be an "indivisible" unit, in the sense that "should this be a separate commit?" equates to "would I ever want to revert just these changes?".
IDK about your commit histories, but if I'd leave everything in there, there'd be a ton of fixup commits just fixing spelling, satisfying the linter,...
Also, changes requested by reviewers: those fixups almost always belong to the same commit, it makes no sense for them to be separate.
And finally, I guess you do technically give up some granularity, but you gain an immense amount of readability of your commit history.