An "AI stash" folder to prevent large directories from choking the input context window

[danielrosehill]

I was looking at the VS Code Ignore script in this project and I'm not sure whether it's intended to do what I'm describing, but in case not, I thought I'd put this out there anyway.

Something I've noticed in a few projects which can really finish off local models particularly is that if you have a folder in the repository with a vast amount of files, by default the AI agent will map it out during the repo mapping stage and then the context window will flood the API

A use case I was working on the other day, just to give an example, was a data wrangling project with about a thousand JSONs in a folder. I was asking the agent for help with writing a data cleaning script but no matter how hard I tried to tell it not to inspect the reference folder in the prompt, it would do so.

It seems that some models will honour the gitignore as parts of the repository they can't index But this is a practice I don't want to get into because if I add these folders to my gitignore they won't get committed and versioned in the project

One idea that came to mind was perhaps an obvious folder name like ai-ignore.

If there is any way that could be integrated into the system prompt, it would be one workaround to the problem.

Otherwise, perhaps there is some way to add a negative prompt telling the agent which folders it can't scan for context, or perhaps that's beyond the bounds of possibility currently.

[mrubens]

Hey! Funny timing, I just opened a PR yesterday to add support for a .rooignore file that uses the same format as .gitignore. Sounds like what you’re looking for? Should be released in the next day or so.

[danielrosehill]

Hey! Funny timing, I just opened a PR yesterday to add support for a .rooignore file that uses the same format as .gitignore. Sounds like what you’re looking for? Should be released in the next day or so.

Ah, you've truly just made my day!

I've kind of got a hacky workaround going on with pulling out individual files and then saying "this is an example they're all like this" but it's cumbersome.

One thing that occurred to me as well after writing this was that it would also be a very useful context item:: exclude this directory from context -> write to your .rooignore perhaps (in much the same way that the Git ignore feature works)

[hannesrudolph]

#rooignore