if you commit but do not push, the metadata tells clearml that it needs to pull a non-existant commit. any changes you made on top may be saved as a diff, but they'd fail to apply.

for clearml to work on un-pushed commits, it'd have to wait for a push to register a new diff target, which can become a problem (what if you have multiple remotes? which one will it wait for?) so rather, it assumes it can access the most recent commit from your remote repo, and records this as the "base" upon which to apply any unstaged diffs.