I second the comment made by the sibling poster that you should generally see the head commit in jj as your staging area, but treated like a real commit instead

I second the comment made by the sibling poster that you should generally see the head commit in jj as your staging area, but treated like a real commit instead of the pseudo-commit that it is in git. That said, I've ran into the same issues in Git with these sorts of perma-dev changes, and in every situation, I was happiest when I just moved that change into a config file or .env file that I could then gitignore. Even when I was careful, there were still accidents where I committed something I didn't mean to, or ended up losing my local configuration and needed to redo things. Whereas with an ignored config file, you can be certain that the changes in there will never get committed. Well, unless you switch to a version from before the config file was added to gitignore, but this is why adding this configuration as soon as possible is so useful!