If I don't publish my intermediate commits, how are you going to tell whether I made lots of small commits and squashed or just didn't bother committing until I

If I don't publish my intermediate commits, how are you going to tell whether I made lots of small commits and squashed or just didn't bother committing until I was finished? The objects generated are identical. Also, the git reflog keeps references to the pre-squash commits for a time, so the information is still there if you realise you squashed too much. My recommendation is that commits should be atomic, minimal changes that take the source into a working state. This makes working with git bisect so much easier, but it does sometimes mean reordering and squashing commits. A safety check in the case where you've got everything working but your history needs some tweaking is to note the hash of your tree in its working state, and verify that the tree you created after squashing has the same hash. You can do that by either inspecting the commit or diffing against the old reference.