Ignore

ignore/ lists what agents must not read or index: secrets, generated code, vendored dependencies, large fixtures. Most tools read their own ignore file, such as .cursorignore, .geminiignore, .aiignore, or .aiderignore. An ignore spec writes the same patterns into each.

• Secrets stay out of context. An .env file or a key folder is not sent to the model.
• Smaller, sharper context. Build output and vendored code stop crowding search and indexing.
• One list. Add a pattern once instead of in every tool's file.

Tools apply an ignore file to their own reads and indexing. Whether it also stops a shell command differs by tool, so pair it with a settings deny rule for anything that must never be read.

Write one

Markdown with optional YAML frontmatter, one file per group. The body holds gitignore-syntax patterns.

Secrets and build artifacts the agent should never read.

```gitignore
*.env
secrets/
dist/
```

With fenced code blocks, only the lines inside them are patterns and the surrounding text is prose, which formatters like Prettier can rewrite safely. A body without a fence is read whole. Prettier strips trailing spaces inside a block: write a name ending in a space as name[ ].

Output

Specs concatenate into each target's native ignore file under a # provenance header, with a blank line between them. Order and whitespace are kept; CRLF becomes LF. Override the path with outputs.<target>.ignore-file. Targets without an ignore file report the spec as unsupported.

Overwrite behaviour

Sync replaces an ignore file with no agnostic-ai provenance header only when every existing exclusion survives, unchanged and in order. Extra patterns are allowed. Missing or reordered patterns, added negations (!pattern), and changed whitespace fail with AAI-103 and leave the file untouched. The check is conservative, so an equivalent rewrite can still fail.

Run agnostic-ai import <target> to copy the patterns into ignore/<target>.md as a fenced block, with comments, order, and whitespace intact and a leading UTF-8 byte-order mark dropped. The spec sets target: <target>; remove the line to share the patterns with every ignore-capable target. Review the combined order if other specs add negations or reorder patterns.

Comment and blank lines exclude nothing. # starts a comment only at the start of a line. outputs.<target>.provenance-header: false removes the marker and disables this check. Dry-run skips the check; sync --check still reports unsafe overwrites.