condense-tasks

---

name: condense-tasks description: Condense completed tasks: structural trim (drop Notes scratchpad, prune middle Progress Log) plus caveman-style prose compression (drop articles, filler, hedging) on remaining body. Validated against load-bearing invariants. Use when the user says "condense tasks", "clean up done tasks", "trim completed backlog", or wants to shrink the size of complete task files. allowed-tools: [Bash, Read] model: sonnet effort: medium

Condense Tasks

Two-pass shrink of tasks/complete/:

1. Structural — drop Notes content, keep first + last Progress Log entries (idempotent, sets condensed: true).
2. Caveman compression — rewrite remaining prose terse, validated against invariants. Sets compressed: true on success.

What gets touched

Section	Pass 1 (condense)	Pass 2 (compress)
Frontmatter	Untouched	Untouched (sets compressed: true)
Title	Untouched	Untouched (heading text byte-exact)
Description	Untouched	Caveman-rewrite
Acceptance Criteria	Untouched	Untouched (validator enforces byte-exact)
Notes	Content dropped	n/a
Learnings	Untouched	Caveman-rewrite (LRN-XXX IDs preserved)
Progress Log	First + last kept	Caveman-rewrite each remaining line

Workflow

1. Pass 1 — structural condense

node "${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/dist/bin/flowstate.js" task-condense --all --json true

Single-task variant when the user names one:

node "${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/dist/bin/flowstate.js" task-condense {{ID}} --json true

2. Pass 2 — caveman compress

List complete tasks and their paths:

node "${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/dist/bin/flowstate.js" task-list --status complete --json true

For each task:

1. Read the file with the Read tool. Skip if frontmatter has compressed: true.
2. Rewrite the body following the caveman rules below. Keep the frontmatter line block (---\n...\n---) out of the rewrite — only the body below it.
3. Pipe the new body to task-compress:

cat <<'BODY' | node "${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/dist/bin/flowstate.js" task-compress {{ID}} --body - --json true
{{COMPRESSED_BODY}}
BODY

Exit code 0 = success, 2 = invariant failure (JSON errors field lists each missing token / modified section). File is left untouched on failure.

4. On invariant failure — re-read the original, retry once with the failure diagnostics included in your reasoning (e.g. "validator says missing URL X — preserve it byte-exact this time"). On second failure, log the task ID + errors and move on. Do not delete or alter the file.

3. Caveman compression rules (Pass 2 body rewrite)

Drop

• Articles: a, an, the
• Filler: just, really, basically, actually, simply, essentially, generally
• Pleasantries: sure, certainly, of course, happy to, I'd recommend
• Hedging: it might be worth, you could consider, it would be good to
• Connective fluff: however, furthermore, additionally, in addition
• Redundant phrasing: in order to → to, make sure to → ensure, the reason is because → because
• "you should", "remember to", "we need to" — state the action directly

Preserve EXACTLY (validator enforces — byte-exact)

• Fenced code blocks (```) — every byte, including blank lines and comments inside
• Inline code (`…`)
• URLs (https://…)
• IDs: TSK-\d{3,}, LRN-\d{3,}, PLN-\d{3,}, RPT-\d{3,}
• Dates: YYYY-MM-DD
• Version numbers: vX.Y.Z
• All markdown headings (same set, same order, exact heading text)
• The entire ## Acceptance Criteria section — do not touch

Compress

• Short synonyms: big not extensive, fix not implement a solution for, use not utilize
• Fragments OK: Run tests before push. not You should always make sure to run the tests before pushing.
• Merge bullets that say the same thing differently
• One example wins where multiple show the same pattern

Pattern

Original: "We were finally able to track down the root cause of the bug, which turned out to be in the auth middleware where the token expiry check was using < instead of <=."

Compressed: "Root cause: auth middleware token expiry check used < instead of <=."

4. Report Summary

Parse the JSON results from both passes. Print:

## Tasks Condensed

**Pass 1 — structural** ({{N}} touched):
- TSK-XXX: {{title}} — saved {{bytes}} bytes

**Pass 2 — caveman compress** ({{N}} touched):
- TSK-XXX: {{title}} — saved {{bytes}} bytes

**Skipped — already compressed** ({{N}})
**Skipped — already lean** ({{N}})
**Failed validation** ({{N}}):
- TSK-XXX: {{first error}}

Total bytes saved: {{TOTAL}}

If nothing was touched: All {{N}} completed tasks are already lean or compressed.

Notes

• Only operates on tasks in tasks/complete/. Pending / active / blocked tasks are not touched.
• Both passes are idempotent and independent: condensed: true blocks re-condense, compressed: true blocks re-compress.
• Validation rejects any rewrite that drops a load-bearing token, reorders headings, or modifies Acceptance Criteria. The original file is preserved on failure.
• Source-of-truth for completion timestamps lives in frontmatter (completed: field).