Usually I write a little code, commit what it is supposed to do, then fixup all the little edge cases and bugs that come naturally. But what's important is that first commit is sets up a little problem with a clear goal, and then everything afterwards works toward that goal.

Two extremely useful aliases:

  [alias]

  fi = !sh -c 'git commit -m \"fixup! $(git log -1 --format='\\''%s'\\'' $@)\"' -    
                                                                                                             
  ri = rebase --interactive --autosquash

First alias allows me to create a commit prefixed with fixup! very easily. So workflow looks like this:

  2536aw3 implementing feature foo
  sfd93ja fixup! implementing feature foo
  ok4jzvd fixup! implementing feature foo
  k4okvxx fixup! implementing feature foo
  2okoswa fixup! implementing feature foo
  zxvorm3 fixup! implementing feature foo
  ko2koaa fixup! implementing feature foo

And then I rebase when git log --graph --pretty goes off the screen.

In Code Complete McConnell writes an example in which he writes the main ideas of how his code will work as comments in an empty file.

so maybe one would go on write this comments, commit them as the 'How', and then in the first commit message write the 'What'? then do the first commit and continue from there.... making the 'How' work

I made a simple proof of concept of the workflow. https://github.com/walle/git-cdd

I would imagine the amount of commits might actually shrink, because there is more focus to each commit.