You might be surprised, it's sort of possible. Ask your favourite AI agent about git clean filters, and .git/info/attributes, the per-clone sibling of .git/info/exclude. The docs are here: https://git-scm.com/docs/gitattributes#_filter

You can from the checked in config file include a local file which is not checked in (only if it exists).

For example, with direnv, the `.envrc` in my projects usually has

    source_env_if_exists .envrc.local

And the repo also ships with a `.envrc.local.example` file.

Until Claude suggested .git/info/exclude, it never crossed my mind to question how ignoring worked. A search would have answered it in seconds, but you have to think to ask first. I didn't, and I suspect most people don't either. Especially with git, which nearly everyone learns by doing; very few of us ever sit down and learn it properly. That's why I wrote it up: so a few more people can learn this the way we learn everything else in git, by accident.

Now that you mention it, I should add a link to those docs in the article. Thanks!

There is a tweet doing numbers on Twitter right now which is effectively:

"Do the reading b/c you would be amazed how many people don't do the reading"

I have never seen these two files in any git repository I've cloned so far.