Avoid the massive end-to-end tax of default full history clones

Default full-history Git clones impose costs across clients, networks, and servers because they require transferring and unpacking an entire repository history, a problem amplified by monorepos, binary-heavy repositories, frequent CI jobs, remote environments, and especially agentic AI workloads that clone repositories repeatedly. The proposed Git Clone Override Policy addresses this by storing a TOML configuration in a repository and using a cross-platform Go binary to intercept only plain, unqualified clone requests, while allowing manually specified clone options and repositories without policies to proceed normally. When applied, it automates a fixed sequence of optimizations including shallow single-branch fetching, partial cloning with deferred blobs, transfer-related Git configuration, and sparse checkout rules that omit many binary file types. The approach is presented as declarative policy-as-code that improves consistency, auditability, security, and adoption across developer machines, CI systems, and AI sandboxes, with reported examples reducing GitLab clones from 9.5 GB to 110 MB, Linux kernel clones from 7.5 GB to 2 GB, and Chromium clones from 60 GB to 5 GB. It can also complement Git LFS by reducing the remaining history, references, and binary downloads that LFS alone does not eliminate.

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