Standalone Commits

A standalone commit is a commit a reviewer can audit on its own, at that point in branch history. It may depend on earlier commits in the same branch, but it should not require future commits to explain, compile, test, or justify it.

Related Skills: See git for conventional commit messages and PR text.

Two Halves: Boundary And Order

This skill owns both halves of commit shaping. Hold them at once:

• The review boundary (this file): is each commit worth reviewing by itself? That is the philosophy and the acceptance checks below.
• The ordering: what order should the standalone commits happen in? For the detailed dependency-ordered wave procedure, read references/splitting-into-ordered-waves.md.

Without ordering, "standalone" drifts into polished but poorly sequenced commits. Without the boundary checks, technically ordered commits can still be hard to review.

The Standard

Each commit should answer one sentence: