| name | cleanup |
| model | haiku |
| description | Clean up completed worktrees and merged branches after confirmation. Use when the user asks to remove stale worktrees or branches. |
Worktree and branch cleanup
Remove worktrees and branches whose work has already merged into origin/main. This is a
mechanical, destructive-with-confirmation skill — it never writes code.
Decide nothing yourself. scripts/worktree_cleanup.sh
holds every safety rule, refuses on its own, and is the only way this skill touches a worktree or a
branch. Do not run git worktree remove, git branch -d, or git branch -D directly, and do not
reason from git worktree list or git branch --merged about what is safe to delete. Those two
commands are what caused BE-0391:
a branch created off origin/main that has not committed anything yet is origin/main, so
--merged lists it and git branch -d deletes it. For such a branch, "merged" means the work has
not started — the state of a session that is running right now.
Steps
-
Audit. The script fetches origin, then prints every worktree with its path, its branch, and
a verdict of REMOVABLE or KEEP with the reasons.
scripts/worktree_cleanup.sh
-
Show the user the audit output as it stands, and ask for confirmation. Quote the script's
own path and branch lines for each REMOVABLE entry. Never describe a worktree by its directory
name alone: a directory is often named after a different topic than the branch it now holds, so
the name can describe work that merged long ago while the branch inside belongs to a live session.
Wait for an explicit yes in the conversation: removal is destructive, so an earlier answer never
carries over to a later run.
-
Remove each confirmed worktree, one at a time. The script re-checks every guard before it
acts, so it refuses a worktree that became busy since the audit.
scripts/worktree_cleanup.sh --remove <path>
A refusal is an answer, not an obstacle. Report it and move on — never work around it by running
git directly, by passing --force, or by widening the staleness window.
-
Prune stale worktree metadata:
git worktree prune
-
Report what was removed, and what was kept and why.
What the script refuses
A worktree is removable only when all of these hold. Each check fails closed, so an answer the
script cannot obtain is a refusal.
- It is neither the main checkout nor the worktree this cleanup runs in.
- It carries no lock. Claude Code writes a lock naming the live session and its process id.
- It is present and not prunable, and its
HEAD is attached to a branch.
- Its working tree has no uncommitted or untracked changes.
- Nothing under it changed within the staleness window (180 minutes by default,
BAJUTSU_CLEANUP_STALE_MINUTES to override). A live session's tree is clean between edits, so
modification time is what shows the session is still there.
- Its branch has no commits absent from
origin/main, and its branch has a merged pull request.
Ancestry alone cannot tell work that finished from work that never started; only a merged pull
request shows the work was delivered.
What this skill does NOT do
- Remove a worktree that any session is using.
- Delete a branch whose work has not landed in a merged pull request.
- Force anything: never
git worktree remove --force, never git branch -D.
- Write code, run tests, or create PRs.
