Split into conventional commits

House rule: one logical change per commit, Conventional Commits, imperative subject, no trailing period, enforced by commitlint. Prefactoring and refactors come before the change that needed them.

From an uncommitted working tree

1. Group the diff. List the hunks and bucket them: the prefactor, the feature, the test, the unrelated fix you noticed. Each bucket is a commit.
2. Stage a bucket — git add -p for hunk-level, or by file. Order: refactor/prefactor first, then the feature, then tests, then docs.
3. Commit with the right type: refactor:, feat:, fix:, test:, chore:, docs: (or whatever a repo's commitlint.config.* defines).
4. Verify each commit builds — git stash the rest, run the build/tests, git stash pop. A commit that doesn't build breaks quality/bisect later.
5. Repeat until the tree is clean.

From an existing fat commit (not yet pushed)

• git reset --soft HEAD~1 to put it all back in the index, then follow the working-tree flow above.
• Or git rebase -i and mark it edit, then git reset HEAD^ at the stop.

Rules

• Never split commits that are already pushed and shared without agreeing first.
• Commit as the configured git user, no AI trailers.
• If two changes are genuinely entangled and can't be separated cleanly, one commit is fine — say so in the body.

Anti-patterns

• ❌ A commit that doesn't build on its own.
• ❌ "wip", "fixes", "stuff" subjects.
• ❌ A refactor and the feature it enabled in one commit.
• ❌ Splitting shared history nobody agreed to rewrite.