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 incremental-commits for ordering multi-commit work into waves. See git for conventional commit messages.

Relationship To Incremental Commits

standalone-commits is the philosophy and acceptance test. It answers: "Is this commit worth reviewing by itself?"

incremental-commits is the sequencing workflow. It answers: "What order should the standalone commits happen in?"

Use them together:

standalone-commits  -> defines the review boundary for each commit
incremental-commits -> orders those boundaries by dependency
git                 -> writes the final message and PR text