I think the answer to the question is "yes, the person staging a partial commit may be making a guess". I think this is because the tool apes an earlier practi

I think the answer to the question is "yes, the person staging a partial commit may be making a guess". I think this is because the tool apes an earlier practice of crafting patches to share with other developers. There are definitely cowboys writing patches to show others, and not necessarily testing every implied snapshot in a chain of such patches. Some CI practices also encourage cowboy commits, i.e. if a team pushes commits to get them tested rather than testing prior to commit. You can imagine an inverted perspective where the stash should be the only non-staging area, and the working copy _is_ the staging area for the next commit. Stash away partial changes you want to defer, then test the current working copy, then commit the working copy. You'd also want status/diff commands that let you more easily compare: working vs HEAD (what can be committed); stash vs HEAD (all uncommitted changes); and stash vs working (deferred changes).