Constantly having to split after the auto-commits feels like I have to keep fighting this automated commit system. It's a bit like the autosave feature of text editors, which some people find useful, but I never felt like it's needed.

A big downside I can see is that sensitive information might end up in the repo forever because I forgot to revert the auto commit.

I think you are misunderstanding the autocommit, but maybe I am.

I think you don't need to do this after every autocommit but only before the manual ones? Isn't that how amending commits in git works? The unamended commit is no longer around, right?

Also it seems to me that you can rewrite old commits in jj to get rid of accidentally committed information a lot more easily than you can remove it from when you accidentally commit it to git...

Meta comment: Bit frustrating to see so many downvotes in these threads when people are just trying to grok what the jj model means concretely for important workflows.

I always end up reading through my commit diffs while committing and then maybe like a third of the time I edit something about them. So for me this seems like it could be a natural acknowledgement of that; just make that editing after the fact be the primary / only workflow.

Haven't used this yet so no idea if it's actually great or terrible, but I like to see ingrained conventional wisdom challenged like this. We're always in some local maximum, so I think it's often interesting to be pushed in some new direction on the gradient.