Harald Nordgren [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

Again this seems to do a "step 1 goes in a direction, step 2 fixes
its mistake, step 3 changes course" drunken-man's walk.

The same advice to restructure them into a logical incremental
progression that moves the codebase in one consistent direction to
eventually reach the goal at the end applies.

Isn't programming always bit of drunken-man's walk?

Yes, but the point is that other people do not have to see you
taking roundabout route (or for that matter, they do not have to see
you coding in your bathrobe like Linus, even if it may be true you
;-).

When other developers later need to figure out what you really
wanted to achieve so that they do not break your intention while
they update your code to fix bugs in it and/or adding new features
on top of it, it would be far easier for them to work on a clean
history.