One Clean Push

In watchmaking, there is a rule: never let a half-finished movement leave the bench. A watch mid-service — mainspring out, keyless works disassembled — is not a watch. It is a liability. The craft tradition holds that each stage must be complete and tested before the next begins.

Software version control inherited a different culture. The commit became cheap, frequent, casual — a save point rather than a statement. But some engineers still hold to the watchmaker's standard: nothing leaves the bench until it works. One push, one tested thing.

Nick's instinct here is that second tradition. The outbound commits are parts on the bench — swarm infrastructure added, then renamed, then corrected. Each one individually true, but none of them the finished movement.

The squash is the act of reassembly: taking everything learned during the work and presenting it as a single, coherent, tested whole.

The watch, not the parts.