Objective

Clean up the /Users/samaguiar/Documents/Projects root repo after prior status showed massive unrelated dirty state.

Completed

• Removed stale .git/index.lock after verifying no active git process owned it.
• Ran git restore --staged . to unstage mass-delete/index noise without changing working files.
• Restored 78 deleted tracked files from HEAD, including canonical Skills/ files.
• Added local-only .git/info/exclude rules to hide generated/local noise: caches, symlinks, nested repos, QA screenshots, backups, reports, WP content exports, and other local artifacts.
• Reduced status from hundreds of staged deletes plus 1,244 untracked files to a focused commit set.
• Avoided committing admin/sam-aguiar-preferences-2026-04-08.md because it contains literal credential text already present in the tracked file.
• Committed one clean branch from origin/main: 534016c8 Clean Projects root repo status.
• Pushed branch codex/projects-root-cleanup-2026-06-03-clean.
• Opened draft PR #8: https://github.com/samaguiar1982-cpu/sail-projects-root/pull/8.

Verification

• git status -sb: clean on codex/projects-root-cleanup-2026-06-03-clean tracking origin.
• git rev-list --count origin/main..HEAD: 1.
• git diff --check origin/main..HEAD: no output.
• Secret/string scan: no literal secrets in staged candidate set; risky preference file was reverted out of the commit.

QA Recommendations Pending Approval

Make ignore cleanup durable across machines

The cleanup used .git/info/exclude, which is intentionally local-only. That fixed this Mac without touching tracked .gitignore, but other machines may still see the same generated-folder noise.