session: reclaim regenerable build outputs from terminal session trees (9.8 GB of a 14.9 GB store) #1786

A read-only audit of ~/.codeaf shows the local store at 14.86 GB, and the bytes are not conversation data:

• trees/ holds 14.14 GB (95%) of the store.
• Inside it, regenerable build outputs — node_modules/ 7.92 GB and target/ 1.90 GB — account for 9.82 GB across nine heavy sessions, kept long after those sessions ended.
• One session alone carries 8.93 GB (7.65 GB node_modules + 1.28 GB target); the top two sessions are 12.14 GB combined.

sessions/ is 213 MB and tasks/ 132 MB. The store is dominated by build residue from finished work, not by anything a person or the engine can still use.

The proposal: add a lifecycle step that reclaims regenerable build outputs from session trees once the session is terminal. The durable evidence of a task is its branch, its report and its receipts — not a restorable node_modules. Deleting the outputs after completion trades an occasional clean rebuild for an order-of-magnitude smaller store.

What goes, what stays

Goes (regenerable, from an exclusion manifest rather than hardcoded):

• node_modules/, target/, and equivalent build-output directories named by the manifest.

Stays:

• .git and all branch state — a task's branch is the deliverable.
• Reports, receipts and diff receipts.
• Any tree the person has bookmarked or pinned as a deliverable.
• Every session that is running or resumable — reclamation runs only on terminal sessions.

Never touched: trees linked to a live worktree elsewhere, and virtualmachine-image-backed sessions. The audit already identified one of each in the current store; both must appear in the dry-run's exclusion list.

Shape

1. Dry-run first. The command reports per-session reclaimable bytes and its exclusion decisions before deleting anything; no deletion without an explicit apply.
2. Terminal-state gate. A session qualifies only in a terminal state, past a configurable retention window (default on the order of days), and not pinned.
3. Reclaim report. Actual blocks freed measured after deletion (clonefile/hardlinked copies free nothing when one link is removed — the report should reflect what the disk actually gave back).
4. Resume contract. Resuming a session whose outputs were reclaimed takes the clean-rebuild path and still lands its acceptance — this is the condition the audit sets for the trade to be safe.

Acceptance

• Dry run on the current store names ~9.8 GB reclaimable across the nine heavy terminal sessions, and lists the linked-live and image-backed sessions as excluded.
• After apply: trees/ drops from 14.14 GB to ~4.3 GB; branches, reports and receipts of every affected session still resolve.
• A resumed session rebuilds cleanly and its acceptance check passes.
• Running and resumable sessions are byte-identical before and after a reclamation pass.

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Drafted with CodeAF · reviewed and owned by the author