Polluting the master repo with a bunch of irrelevant commits isn't giving you context, it's giving you pollution. There's nothing to fear about merge commits. It's about wasting everyone's time by adding your 9 commits to fix a single bug to the history. I work on teams, and we care about tasks. The fact that your task took you 9 commits is irrelevant to me. What is relevant is the commit that shows you completed the task.