Only recursive and force are “slow”, looks like it collects something illegal and then filter it out.

$ pijul init p1
$ cd p1
$ time pijul add . ..

real 0m0,014s
user 0m0,004s
sys 0m0,007s
$ time pijul add -rf . ..

real 0m0,568s
user 0m2,120s
sys 0m1,629s
$ 

I can’t reproduce, I believe this is fixed. I checked the code, .. seems to be filtered out immediately, which is also confirmed by my tests.