Cleanup
Agent work leaves residue. Every task cuts a worktree, every conversation leaves a transcript, and both outlive the work that produced them — across three CLIs and every repository you touch. Cleanup is the one place that shows what has gone quiet and lets you throw it away.
Open it from the trash icon in the sidebar rail, with ⌘K → "Cleanup", or by clicking a reminder.
The idle threshold and a one-line count of everything stale sit at the top. Under them, each list is its own tab — Sessions, Processes, Roundtables and Worktrees — and each tab shows how many rows it holds, so you can see where the work is without opening it. Picking a tab replaces the list below; nothing scrolls. The view opens on the first tab that has anything in it.
What counts as stale
One setting drives the whole view: the idle threshold, default 30 days. Anything untouched for longer than that is listed; everything else is invisible here. The presets run 30 / 60 / 90 days, 6 months, and a year, and the choice is remembered.
The threshold has a hard floor of 7 days — short thresholds would sweep up work you're merely between sittings on.
Not the same as the history window
Settings › View › History controls what the sidebar shows. Cleanup's threshold controls what this view offers to delete. They are independent on purpose.
Sessions
Every session from every agent, oldest first, with its size on disk. Two actions, two very different consequences:
- Delete — removes the agent's own log file (for Copilot, the session's state directory) and the worktree the session ran in, and the branch when git reports it as fully merged. This cannot be undone. It takes two clicks: the first arms the button, the second commits.
- Archive — hides the session in Cockpit. Nothing on disk is touched, nothing is reclaimed, and you can bring it back from the archived toggle in the sidebar. The reversible tier, for getting something out of the sidebar rather than off the disk.
Sessions with an agent currently running in them are listed but never selectable.
The worktree goes with the session
A session and the checkout it ran in are one piece of work, so the row says what it will take: takes its worktree · 412 MB. Deleting the transcript while leaving a 412MB abandoned checkout behind would not be a cleanup.
Two rules keep that safe:
- A worktree hosting several sessions only goes when every one of them is being deleted. The row marks these
shared ×3, and the running total beside the button only counts a worktree once it is fully covered. - The blocks below still apply. A worktree with uncommitted work, a live agent, or your own main checkout is never attached to a session in the first place — deleting the session leaves it alone.
Processes
Dev servers, watchers and shells still running inside a stale worktree, or inside one already removed from under them (Cockpit's, Claude Code's .claude/worktrees, Codex's and Copilot's), grouped by the worktree they run in. Stop is armed like Delete and sends each one SIGTERM, never a kill — but only while the pid still names the same process, with the same command line and start time, as the scan showed; one that ignores the signal is reported as still running.
Roundtables
Tables nobody has spoken to in a while, plus every table you archived — archiving one is already the decision, so it is listed at once. A table is one row: deleting it takes its seat sessions and the directory it ran in (its room, or its worktree and the branch when git reports it fully merged). A table mid-round is never selectable, and one whose worktree has uncommitted changes is refused before anything of it is deleted — seats included.
Worktrees
The leftovers: checkouts no stale session claims — a session's own worktree is on its row under Sessions. Cockpit asks git itself which worktrees each repository has, so this is not limited to the ones Cockpit created:
- cockpit — cut by Cockpit for a task, under the app's own data directory.
- external — everything else: Claude Code's own
.claude/worktrees, worktrees you made by hand, another tool's. Found, listed, and cleanable all the same.
Each row shows its repository, branch, age, size on disk, how many indexed sessions ran in it, and any commits no remote has. Every worktree appears exactly once across the view — either on the session that owns it, or here.
Remove runs git worktree remove — never with --force. Afterwards, the branch is deleted only if git reports it as fully merged (git branch -d, which refuses anything else). Removing a worktree never loses commits: the branch stays in the repository unless git itself says everything on it is already merged.
What is never removed
Rows that can't be cleaned stay visible with the reason spelled out, and their checkbox is disabled. There is no override:
| Reason | Why |
|---|---|
| uncommitted changes | the work isn't saved anywhere else |
| commits on no branch | its HEAD is detached on commits no branch, tag or remote holds — removing the worktree would lose them, so check out a branch there first |
| an agent is running | a live turn is using the directory |
| a process is running | a dev server, watcher or shell still works in it — stop it on the Processes tab first |
| the repo's own checkout | Cockpit never touches your main working copy |
| a roundtable's room | it belongs to the table, not to one session |
| locked | you ran git worktree lock on it |
A worktree whose directory is already gone shows as directory gone — cleaning it just clears the dead registration (git worktree prune).
Finding things
Every list but Processes has a filter bar. Free text on the left searches titles, projects and paths; to its right sit dimension pills — one per axis, each summarising its own selection:
| Sessions | Agent, Project, State (has a worktree, archived, blocked) |
| Roundtables | Agent (any seat), Project, State (has a worktree, scratch room, archived, blocked) |
| Worktrees | Origin, Project, State (removable, blocked, unpushed, directory gone) |
Click a pill to open it, then click values to include them. Every option also carries a ⊘ on hover that excludes it instead — so "every project except docs" is one click. Within a dimension the values are OR-ed; across dimensions they are AND-ed. The pill tells you where it stands: Any → web → not docs → 2 selected, 1 excluded.
Add filter puts another dimension on the bar, and Remove from bar takes one off. A dimension that is currently filtering always stays visible whether pinned or not, so the bar can never hide something that is shaping the list. Clear all appears once anything is active.
Selecting in bulk
- The checkbox in each group header selects everything the current filter shows — filter to one agent, select all, act. It skips blocked rows, so it can never arm something that would only be refused.
- Shift-click a second row to select the whole range between it and the last one you touched. Shift also works from the keyboard.
- Selections survive a filter change, and switching tabs. If some of what you have selected is no longer on screen, the header says so (
3 not shown) rather than acting on it silently. - The header adds up what the selection actually frees, worktrees included:
12 selected · 840 MB · 3 worktrees.
Reminders
You don't have to remember to come here. Once a day Cockpit runs the same scan in the background, using the same idle threshold. When it finds something new that is ready to clean:
- the trash icon in the sidebar gets an amber dot, and its tooltip says what is waiting ("Cleanup can free 2.1 GB — 12 sessions · 3 worktrees");
- you get a notification. Click it to open Cleanup.
"Ready to clean" means you could select it right now. Rows that are blocked — uncommitted changes, an agent running, and the rest — don't count, since those are yours to deal with first. The reminder counts everything that is ready, and shows the space as the total all of it would free.
Cockpit tries not to nag:
- At most once a week. The check runs daily, so a reminder is never more than a day late once the week is up.
- Only for things you haven't seen. Anything that was in the last reminder, or on screen the last time you opened Cleanup, never triggers another one. Say you decide to keep an old worktree: you won't hear about it again. Opening Cleanup also restarts the week.
- Quietly. No sound, and nothing on the Dock badge. The dot goes away when you open Cleanup.
The first check runs a few minutes after launch, not during it. A reminder never deletes anything: nothing goes until you pick it here.
Turn reminders off with Cleanup reminders in Settings › Notifications. With the switch off, the background scan doesn't run at all.
Safety
Nothing in this view acts on a path the renderer supplied. Session ids are re-looked-up in the index and their files re-checked against your configured config homes before anything is unlinked; worktree paths are re-derived from git immediately before removal, and a worktree that picked up uncommitted changes since the scan is refused rather than forced.