Development record
Renaming abcd's home to ~/.abcd.noindex (itd-2610030720038073) keeps the home out of Spotlight, but the .abcd/ folder inside each repository is still indexed: a folder whose name starts with a dot is not skipped, only one whose name ends in .noindex. On 2026-10-05, macOS 27.0, mdfind in this checkout returned at least 45,000 indexed items under .abcd/.work.local and about 3,150 under the committed tiers, and .abcd/.work.local/scratch alone holds about 130,000 files (1.6 GB), so every scratch export, log and review an agent writes there sets off indexing work, the cost the home rename was meant to remove. The intent's scope names the home only, so nothing covers the in-repo tiers.
Renaming abcd's home to ~/.abcd.noindex (itd-2610030720038073) keeps the home out of Spotlight, but the .abcd/ folder inside each repository is still indexed: a folder whose name starts with a dot is not skipped, only one whose name ends in .noindex. On 2026-10-05, macOS 27.0, mdfind in this checkout returned at least 45,000 indexed items under .abcd/.work.local and about 3,150 under the committed tiers, and .abcd/.work.local/scratch alone holds about 130,000 files (1.6 GB), so every scratch export, log and review an agent writes there sets off indexing work, the cost the home rename was meant to remove. The intent's scope names the home only, so nothing covers the in-repo tiers.
Addition 2026-10-16 (product thinker)
The product thinker asked for the same fix and set its scope: abcd excludes the local tier from Spotlight by itself on a Mac, in every repository it manages, not only this one, by giving the folder a name ending in .noindex (for example .abcd/.work.local.noindex/). The rename needs a matching .gitignore entry in each repository, so the renamed folder is never committed by accident, and checkouts that still carry the old folder need it moved. It is not urgent.
The same day showed what the name buys on macOS 27.0.1 (iss-2610161806164689): Spotlight reads no contents of files under a .noindex folder but still records each file's name and dates, so a person who wants no entries at all still adds the folder to Search Privacy by hand.
Frontmatter
| id | iss-2610050543365882 |
|---|---|
| type | issue |
| lifecycle | open |
| severity | minor |
.abcd/work/issues/open/iss-2610050543365882-in-repo-abcd-folder-is-still-indexed-by.md
open on GitHub ↗ · commit history ↗
mentions2
- iss-2610161806164689On macOS 27.0.1 Spotlight still catalogues every file under abcd's home by name, although the .noindex name keeps it from reading their contents, so the shipped claim of itd-2610030720038073 that Spotlight skips the home holds only in part. On 2026-10-16, after a reboot at about 15:45, mdfind -onlyin ~/.abcd.noindex returned 589,828 entries, 199,371 of them changed that day: lab copies (21,393 in one lab made at 10:04), worktrees, transcripts, scratch and a clone's git objects. A content search for a word that appears in each of the 208 AGENTS.md copies there found none of them, while the same search found the word in a checkout outside the home, so contents are not imported. Each new file still costs the catalogue a little work, which is far less than a content import, but a lab or worktree copy creates tens of thousands at once. The intent's scope condition names macOS 27.0 with a dated receipt and says each later version holds the claim only once its own receipt is dated; 27.0.1 has none, and the receipt that exists measured indexer CPU, not what the index holds.
- itd-2610030720038073abcd keeps its home folder out of desktop indexing by default