always use `git add -p`. review each individual hunk before staging it into commit. dont blindly add everything. once you've got it working, do a second pass o

always use `git add -p`. review each individual hunk before staging it into commit. dont blindly add everything. once you've got it working, do a second pass on the commit history and compress it into one or more coherent logical commits, reordering or squashing changes as necessary. learn the interactive rebase interface. lots of operations of the form `git rebase -i HEAD^^^^^^` where necessary, if you need to erase your old messy history from a feature branch and overwrite it with your tidied up commits, `git push --force-with-lease some-remote some-feature-branch`. in general, avoid using `--force`, and if you ever believe you need `--force`, prefer `--force-with-lease` . the latter avoids some failure modes related to race conditions where a coworker pushes some commits and your concurrent `--force` push that lands a few seconds later blows them all away.