OP here. :-) (feel like I should put an emoji here). My focus as I "built" this was getting to a correct implementation, and putting in place guards and context to achieve that. As I moved through the process I added more and more ways to eval progress toward that. An area I didn't invest any of my effort in was commit messages, and some of them caused me to spit take as I saw them go by. I think this is something that can definitely be improved, and this conversation is fuel for thought on how to do this.