Stop squashing your commits. You're squashing your AI too
Everyone keeps saying “keep your Git history clean.” Squash, rebase, linearize. It looks neat in the git log. But here’s the thing: in 2025 our biggest collaborators aren’t just humans, they’re AI tools. And those tools need the messy history: the failed attempts, the typos, the bad refactors. That’s the context they learn from. When we squash everything into a perfect history, we’re deleting the very breadcrumbs that could help an agent explain a bug, trace a regression, or warn us we’re about to repeat an old mistake. “Clean history” makes reviewers happy today. But it’s technical debt for tomorrow’s AI-assisted development 2 comments on Hacker News.
Everyone keeps saying “keep your Git history clean.” Squash, rebase, linearize. It looks neat in the git log. But here’s the thing: in 2025 our biggest collaborators aren’t just humans, they’re AI tools. And those tools need the messy history: the failed attempts, the typos, the bad refactors. That’s the context they learn from. When we squash everything into a perfect history, we’re deleting the very breadcrumbs that could help an agent explain a bug, trace a regression, or warn us we’re about to repeat an old mistake. “Clean history” makes reviewers happy today. But it’s technical debt for tomorrow’s AI-assisted development
Everyone keeps saying “keep your Git history clean.” Squash, rebase, linearize. It looks neat in the git log. But here’s the thing: in 2025 our biggest collaborators aren’t just humans, they’re AI tools. And those tools need the messy history: the failed attempts, the typos, the bad refactors. That’s the context they learn from. When we squash everything into a perfect history, we’re deleting the very breadcrumbs that could help an agent explain a bug, trace a regression, or warn us we’re about to repeat an old mistake. “Clean history” makes reviewers happy today. But it’s technical debt for tomorrow’s AI-assisted development 2 comments on Hacker News.
Everyone keeps saying “keep your Git history clean.” Squash, rebase, linearize. It looks neat in the git log. But here’s the thing: in 2025 our biggest collaborators aren’t just humans, they’re AI tools. And those tools need the messy history: the failed attempts, the typos, the bad refactors. That’s the context they learn from. When we squash everything into a perfect history, we’re deleting the very breadcrumbs that could help an agent explain a bug, trace a regression, or warn us we’re about to repeat an old mistake. “Clean history” makes reviewers happy today. But it’s technical debt for tomorrow’s AI-assisted development
Hacker News story: Stop squashing your commits. You're squashing your AI too
![Hacker News story: Stop squashing your commits. You're squashing your AI too]()
Reviewed by Tha Kur
on
August 26, 2025
Rating:
No comments: