Squash merging combines all commits from a feature branch into a single commit when merging to maintain a clean, linear project history. As the creator of CoreUI, a widely used open-source UI library, and with over 25 years of experience in software development, I’ve managed thousands of feature merges where clean commit history is crucial for project maintenance. The most effective approach is using git merge --squash, which combines all changes from the feature branch into staging without creating a merge commit. This method is perfect for feature branches with multiple work-in-progress commits that should be consolidated.

A hard reset in Git completely discards all changes in your working directory and staging area, reverting everything to a specific commit state. As the creator of CoreUI with over 25 years of software development experience, I use hard resets carefully when I need to completely abandon current changes and return to a clean state. This operation is destructive and cannot be easily undone, so use it with caution.