cleanup

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

1. 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
   

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. Prune stale worktree metadata:

   git worktree prune
   

5. 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.