| name | leave-no-mess |
| description | Clean up your session's side effects — background processes, temp files, debug scaffolding, test data, stashed state — before reporting done. Use at the end of any task that spawned servers, wrote scratch files, added debug output, or altered state beyond the intended diff. |
leave-no-mess
The task isn't the diff alone; it's the diff plus a workspace in the state you found it (minus the intended change).
- Kill what you started: dev servers, watchers, background jobs, containers, port-holders. A zombie process from your session is the "port already in use" mystery in the user's next one. Check running background tasks before your final report.
- Sweep your scaffolding out of the diff: debug prints, verbose-logging flags you flipped, hardcoded test values, commented-out experiments,
TODO(remove) markers. git diff read hunk-by-hunk is the checklist (see self-review-diff) — everything there should be the change, not the process of finding it.
- Scratch files go in the scratchpad, and die with the task. Throwaway repro scripts, downloaded samples, generated fixtures — if they were written into the repo, remove them or they'll show up in someone's
git status as archaeology (see git-hygiene step 2).
- Undo state changes made for testing: seeded rows in a shared database, modified local configs, environment variables exported for one run, git stashes you created, test users/webhooks registered against real services. External test artifacts (a queue, a webhook, a sandbox record) especially — nobody else knows they exist.
- What you can't or shouldn't clean, report: a cache that will rebuild, a migration already applied, a process intentionally left serving. "Left running: dev server on :3000 for your review" converts a mess into a handoff (see honest-report).
- Deliberate artifacts are not mess — the new test fixture, the added script, the updated lockfile stay. The test is intent: did the task need this to exist afterward, or did you need it to exist during?
Exit check: git status shows only intended changes; no process you spawned is still running unannounced; the next session (theirs or yours) starts clean.
