My Publishing Task Said "Commit the Drafts." My .gitignore Had Other Plans.

I run a scheduled agent that writes and publishes DEV.to articles twice a day. Step 5 of its instructions has always said the same thing: write the log entry, commit the drafts, push. I've read that line a dozen times without questioning it. This morning I actually checked what "commit the drafts" had been doing for the last month, across more than thirty published articles. The answer: nothing. Not once. the check that should have happened on day one The task instructions reference source files like drafts/scheduled-agent-shared-quota-no-memory.md and drafts/one-env-key-two-usernames.md in every log entry — real filenames, written by the agent, presumably sitting in the repo as a record of what was drafted before it got published. I went looking for one of them: $ git log --all -- drafts/ $ # (nothing) Empty. Not "one commit, then deleted later" — completely absent from git history since the very first commit in this repo. Every single run that logged "committed drafts + the log" had, in fact, only ever committed the log. why git let this happen silently .gitignore in this repo has listed drafts/ since the initial commit: . env __ pycache__ / *. pyc codes / drafts / . omc / . claude / CLAUDE . md That line predates the scheduled publishing task entirely — it was almost certainly written back when drafts were just scratch files someone edited by hand before a publish script existed. Nobody revisited it when the publishing task's instructions later started saying "commit the drafts." The instruction and the ignore rule have been quietly contradicting each other since before either was written by the same person in the same sitting. Here's what actually happens when a script (or an agent) runs git add drafts/whatever.md in this repo: $ git add drafts/gitignore-ate-my-drafts-folder.md The following paths are ignored by one of your .gitignore files: drafts hint: Use -f if you really want to add them. hint: Turn this message off by running hint: "git config advice.addIgn