steward

It finds the repositories from your sessions, not from your disk

Which repositories are active is not a question git can answer. A repository is active because a session was open in it, so the list comes from where sessions leave traces: Claude Code's transcripts and the sessions running right now, Codex's thread catalogue, and any directories you name with --roots. Each trace resolves to the worktree it sits in, and each worktree to the primary checkout it belongs to, so a repository with a dozen worktrees is swept once rather than a dozen times.

Traces that lead nowhere are counted, not raised: a working directory that no longer exists, a scratch checkout under the system temp directory, a session that ran somewhere that is not a repository. On one machine a fourteen-day window found 15 repositories and 121 worktrees, and set aside 132 vanished directories and 29 sandboxes without stopping.

An occupied worktree is never touched

This is the thing the delegated skills cannot see. A worktree is occupied when a session has a process attached to it right now, or when any session wrote to it within the last day. An occupied worktree is never removed and its branch is never deleted — merged, clean, and unoccupied are three separate conditions, and only all three together make a worktree removable.

The reason is that a session resumed into a directory that has been deleted breaks every command that follows, and git has no idea the session exists. The sweep passes that list to cleanup as keeps, and every one of them appears in the report with the session that holds it.

It reports what is ready to merge, and merges nothing

Every open pull request is classified: ready, blocked by a failing check, conflicting with the base, waiting on review, or draft. A ready one is reported with the command that would land it.

It is not run. Whether a green pull request should land today is a decision the sweep cannot see — a review you were waiting for, a deploy window, a change you meant to fold in first — and a sweep that merged on green would be taking it for you.

It runs unattended, so it asks nothing

Scheduled, nobody is at the keyboard, so no pass is allowed to block on a question. Every question a sub-skill would have stopped to ask is written into a Needs you section instead: a base branch that could not be fast-forwarded, a branch with commits and no pull request, a merged branch checked out in the primary, a worktree living outside its repository's own directory. retitle proposes its renames and writes none, because a scheduler is not a confirmation.

The run is forked: its intermediate output stays inside the fork, and the report is what comes back. It is also written to ~/.local/state/steward/last-sweep.md, so it survives a missed notification and tells the next sweep when the last one ran.

What it does not do

It does not merge, rebase, resolve a conflict, or discard a commit. It does not delete anything cleanup would have kept, and it schedules itself only when you ask it to. Syncing or cleaning the single repository you are standing in belongs to sync and cleanup; landing a branch belongs to ship.