0011 — The company list is private config, not a committed seed¶

Status: accepted

The curated company list is the user's ingestion target and is kept out of the public repo, like .env. The real list lives in config/companies.csv (gitignored); only config/companies.example.csv is committed (for format + CI). The Python ingest reads settings.companies_csv (default config/companies.csv), falling back to the example when the private file is absent, so a fresh clone and CI still run.

It is no longer a dbt seed: no model referenced it, and seeding it would have published it. The deal-breaker tech and allowed-location lists remain committed seeds (generic, non-private, and used by models). If a warehouse-side company table is wanted in V2, ingest can land it then.

The private list is populated by the manual company-discovery notebook (ADR-0018), which detects each company's ATS; that notebook's real-company output is gitignored for the same reason this list is.