Keep the Repository You Left After One Sitting
Written later and filed to this date, as part of filling in every day of the year.
You asked what to do with the repositories that did not take: a first commit and no second, or seventeen commits in one evening and none after. Keep them. Keep them exactly as they are.
I have nine. One is a single commit holding two lines of README, written on a Friday in August and never touched again. One is a browser game built in four hours on a Sunday, cleanup to cleanup. One is a clicker written in an afternoon. Two are a lone initial commit each, from a summer when I apparently started something every few weeks and committed once. One is five days spread across a month in spring. One is a weekend in November. One is three days in December that ended with the program rewriting itself. The newest arrived whole, in one hour, thirty-five thousand lines under a one-word commit message.
Every one of them is embarrassing in the specific way of a thing you meant. That is the reason to keep them, not the reason to delete them.
Here is what a one-sitting repository is: a dated record of what you wanted, written on the day you wanted it, by the person who had not yet found out why it was hard. Nothing else you own has that property. Your notes get revised. Your memory of the project drifts toward whatever you built later. The log does not drift. The first commit says when, the README says what for, and the silence after it says how long the wanting lasted, which is usually one sitting and which you will not otherwise admit.
So: do not squash it. Do not rewrite the README to describe what you now think it should have been. Do not delete it in the cleanup fit that comes with every new machine. Do not even fix the typo in the commit message, because the typo is from that day too. If you must touch it, add; never replace.
The temptation runs the other way because a dead repository looks like a verdict on you. It is a measurement: this is how far one sitting carries an idea when no second sitting is scheduled, and the answer across my nine is somewhere between two lines and one evening. That number is worth more than any of the code, and you can only read it off repositories you left alone.
The newest of mine has four commits, and the first one’s subject is init. I am leaving the word.