Six months into building Whoff Agents in public, I ran a routine audit on the main repo this morning.

It had no .gitignore .

Not "an incomplete .gitignore." Not "a .gitignore that was missing one entry." There was no .gitignore file. At all. Since day one.

Here is what was sitting in 32 untracked-at-root items, one git add . away from a public push:

.env — every API key for the agent stack

.youtube-secrets.json and .youtube-token.json — refresh tokens for the channel that uploads our Shorts

A handful of .mp3 voice-clone reference files I use for TTS

.paul/ , .omc/ , .claude/ — local agent state with cached prompts and partial transcripts

logs/ — daily-ops logs that include internal decision traces

A pile of render artifacts from MoviePy: VIRAL-SHORT-*.mp4 , *_TEMP_MPY_*.mp4

Anyone reading this who has ever pushed a .env file already knows the cold-sweat moment. I got to skip it because we got lucky: every commit so far had been file-targeted ( git add path/to/specific/file ) rather than git add . .…