There's definitely some merit in keeping the original intent of commit messages even when "committing early and often", but at the end of the day a pull request

There's definitely some merit in keeping the original intent of commit messages even when "committing early and often", but at the end of the day a pull request is supposed to tell some kind of story. When you `git blame` or `git log` a particular file, aren't you more interested in the higher-level changes than a single developer's own miniature storyline of how it got that way? I'll give you another analogy...If I'm composing a song, and you're not particularly trying to learn how to write songs, what is more relevant to you, the end result or the various drafts and early versions that made it to that end result? For the majority of people who aren't interested in learning the mechanics of songwriting, the "journey" is definitely not as interesting as the destination. For nerds like you and I, that's part of the fun! So I try to keep the original intent of my commits, and preserve their messages in a bullet-pointed list format, to show the individual changes that were made in addition to a higher-level overview of the overall change to the project. TLDR: Project-level changes are not the same as individual changes, and while both should be represented in commit messages, the project-level changes are overwhelmingly more useful in the future. Git is not about code storage, it's about code communication. It's about developers on the same team communicating with both prose and code in tandem.