That's my understanding of the intentions of git too. The intent seemed to be to have multiple porcelains over the same plumbing. That's why it bothers me when

That's my understanding of the intentions of git too. The intent seemed to be to have multiple porcelains over the same plumbing. That's why it bothers me when people talk about the default git CLI as if it's the only correct way to work with git and that we're intended to fully grok the underlying representation. I understand plenty about the internals of git, but I still don't want to think about that when I'm just trying to version control my code. Especially because knowing any of that doesn't help me remember the many inconsistent combinations of commands and switches that actually cause various updates to the states of the graph and the pointers.