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Default "build" skip hides tracked first-party source, and explore returns unrelated matches instead of saying so

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
25/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Active
Tech stack
csharp
Domain
search, tooling

Research direction

Start with the default skip list that contains build, and with how codegraph_explore reports partial misses, since the #2026 miss diagnostics only cover full misses. Also check how sync handles paths that a changed ignore file un-ignores, and how init/status report skipped directories. The issue offers three separate changes and the maintainer has not chosen one, so agree on scope before writing code. Done means a repro in a .NET repo with a tracked build/ folder either gets indexed or gets a visible warning.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Version: 1.6.2, Windows 11, Claude Code

Our repo (.NET) has a root build/ folder that's real, tracked source: about 86 C# files across several small tool projects (release notes builder, packaging, validators). Their actual build output lives in bin/ and obj/, which are already gitignored. Because build is on the default skip list, none of it was indexed.

That on its own would be easy to spot, but explore didn't tell us anything was missing. A query naming symbols that only exist under build/:

codegraph_explore "ReleaseNotesBuilder Program Main ChangelogParser PersistentData Entry AddFeatures"

returned Main from an unrelated Program.cs elsewhere in the repo plus a C++ Parser class, with no hint that most of the names matched nothing. We only figured it out after querying by file path, which gave "No indexed file uniquely matches". The agent was a few steps into reading the wrong code by then.

Workaround: !/build/ in the root .gitignore, then a full codegraph index. With the negation in .git/info/exclude, codegraph sync reported "Already up to date" and found nothing new; only a full index picked the folder up. include in codegraph.json isn't an option, since the docs say it never resurfaces built-in skipped dirs.

Suggestions:

  1. Don't apply the build skip to a folder that contains tracked project/source files whose output is gitignored, or at least report skipped default dirs with tracked source in init/status, so people know to opt in. #1998 did the first part for JVM packages named build; the same trap exists for .NET and others.
  2. Extend the #2026 miss diagnostics to partial misses: when identifier-like query words match nothing, say so even if other results are returned.
  3. Have sync notice newly un-ignored paths after an ignore-file change, or say that a full index is needed.
Dominant language
C
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Merged PRs (30d)
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