amitkot Plans and investigations: .local/ first, docs/ only when shared
Personal-process markdown — plans you're drafting, investigation notes, design sketches, post-mortem scratch — defaults to .local/<kind>/<slug>.md (gitignored). Write to docs/<kind>/<slug>.md only when the artefact is explicitly meant for the team or being promoted as canonical.
Why
docs/ is git-tracked, so every WIP plan and half-finished investigation that lands there becomes commit-history noise teammates see in diffs. .local/ (excluded via .git/info/exclude or .gitignore) gives the same plans/, investigations/, design/ ergonomics without polluting shared history. The split has to be made at file-creation time — once committed, a private-flavoured doc is harder to retract than to never write there.
How to apply
Default to .local/<kind>/ for plans drafted before approval, investigation notes and raw findings, unshared design sketches, anything you'd be mildly embarrassed to see in git log next month.
Write to docs/<kind>/ only when the user asks for a shared artefact, when promoting a reviewed plan to canonical, or for a deliverable in itself (architecture reference, runbook, post-mortem the team will read). Promote .local/ → docs/ as an explicit move + commit the user can see, not a quiet git add.
.local/ has no git history or backup — anything that becomes load-bearing (referenced across sessions, asked about by others) should graduate to docs/.