| name | leave-behind |
| description | Produce a ranked emergency leave-behind list — what to abandon, in what order, to get under the allowance, ranked by cost per kilogram saved and by whether the item can be re-bought at the destination. Use when the user is overweight and willing to leave things, asks what to drop, or wants a contingency list for the check-in desk. Writes leave-behind.md. |
| allowed-tools | Read, Write, Edit, Bash(python3 *), Grep, Glob |
Leave Behind
The list you want to have already made when a scale reads 26.4 kg and there is a queue behind
you. Deciding what to abandon takes ten calm minutes at home and goes badly in ninety seconds
at a counter.
Only run this when the user has said they are willing to leave things. It is not the first
answer to being overweight — /travel-packing:overage prices the alternatives, and paying a
fee is frequently the better deal.
The ranking
Not "heaviest first". The right ordering is cost per kilogram saved, where cost accounts
for what it takes to undo the decision:
cost_per_kg = effective_cost / kilograms_saved
effective_cost = replacement cost at the destination, if it can be bought there
= full value, if it cannot
= ∞, for anything essential or irreplaceable
Which is why replaceable_at_destination in the inventory earns its place. A 900 g bottle of
shampoo replaceable for $4 ranks far above a 200 g charger that costs $60 and a trip to a shop
in a city the traveller does not know — even though the charger is lighter.
scripts/pack_solver.py --overflow computes this ranking and writes it to plan.yaml under
overflow_ranking. Read it rather than re-deriving it by eye.
Categories that reliably top the list
Check these before anything else — they are where most travellers are carrying dead weight:
- Liquids and toiletries. Dense, cheap, available everywhere. Full-size shampoo,
conditioner and shower gel are frequently 1.5–2 kg between them, and are the single most
common thing worth abandoning.
- Water. Empty every bottle before weighing. A litre is a kilogram.
- Paper. Books, printouts, magazines. Heavy, and mostly duplicable on a phone.
- Duplicates. The third pair of jeans, the second charger of the same type, spare cables.
- Shoes. A pair of shoes is often 0.8–1.2 kg. Wear the heaviest pair; drop the third pair.
- Packaging. Boxes, blister packs, original cartons for things bought on the trip. Often
hundreds of grams per item and no function past the shop door.
And the categories that must never enter the ranking regardless of weight: medication and
its documentation, passports and travel documents, prescription glasses, medical devices, keys,
and anything with a value that is not financial. Mark these tier: essential in the inventory
so the ranking cannot reach them.
Where the abandoned things go
Say this explicitly, per item, because "leave behind" at an airport usually means a bin:
- Given to whoever is at the airport — the best outcome, available only if someone drove.
- Posted from the airport — many terminals have a post office or a shipping desk landside.
Only useful for compact, valuable items, and only before security.
- Left at home — for the outbound leg, this is really "removed from the bag now", which is
the whole point of doing this at home.
- Binned. The default, and the reason to have ranked properly.
Output
Write leave-behind.md with:
- The shortfall in kilograms, stated first, and which bag it is in.
- The ranked table: item, weight, where it currently is (bag and cube — the traveller has to
physically find it), cost per kg saved, replaceable at destination, and the running
cumulative saving. The cumulative column is the operative one: it says where to stop.
- A marked stop line — the point at which the bag comes under the limit, with the margin
at that point.
- A short physical procedure: which bag to open, which cube the first three items are in, and
what to do with them. The cube assignment is what makes this executable at a counter in
under a minute.
Keep the list to what is actually needed plus roughly 30% margin. A ranking of forty items is
a document nobody reads under pressure; ten is a list someone can act on.
