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[FEATURE] Auto-generate .claudeignore based on project type #30857

@abdulmuhg

Description

@abdulmuhg

Preflight Checklist

  • I have searched existing requests and this feature hasn't been requested yet
  • This is a single feature request (not multiple features)

Problem Statement

When starting Claude Code in a project, it would be great if it could detect the project type (Android/Gradle, Node, Python, etc.) and automatically suggest or generate a .claudeignore to exclude common heavy directories like build/, .gradle/, node_modules/, etc.

Proposed Solution

Currently, users have to manually create .claudeignore each time, and without it, large projects experience noticeable typing lag due to Claude Code indexing thousands of unnecessary files.

Possible approaches:

  • Auto-detect and suggest on first run (like GitHub's .gitignore templates)
  • Support a global ~/.claude/claudeignore that applies to all projects
  • Read from existing .gitignore patterns automatically

Alternative Solutions

No response

Priority

High - Significant impact on productivity

Feature Category

Performance and speed

Use Case Example

I work on a large Android project (~230K files, 9.6GB) with 23 modules. When I first opened it with Claude Code, there was noticeable typing lag on every keystroke.
After manually creating a .claudeignore to exclude .gradle/, **/build/, .idea/, and libs/, the lag improved significantly.

This is a common problem — most project types have heavy directories that don't need to be indexed:

  • Android/Gradle: .gradle/, **/build/
  • Node.js: node_modules/
  • Python: .venv/, pycache/
  • iOS/Xcode: DerivedData/, Pods/

New users won't know about .claudeignore until they experience the lag and go searching for a fix. Auto-detection would solve this out of the box.

Additional Context

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