I agree with this. In the above mentioned cleanup procedure, one of my developers was convinced that git would commit all changes during an interactive rebase

I agree with this. In the above mentioned cleanup procedure, one of my developers was convinced that git would commit all changes during an interactive rebase where he was splitting a changeset regardless of what he had staged. I asked him the exact commands he used: git rebase -i whatever # select a thing to edit and split git add -p # ... git commit git rebase --continue Said it never split his change. Then I saw his transcript -- it included "git commit -a" Apparently he got so used to typing that that he just instinctively placed "-a" at the end of "git commit" because that's how you do it. I'm pretty sure he wasted hours with the magic -a option (not counting the ones that required the commits to be split up in the first place).