The startup pruner is deliberately conservative (unattended, pre-banner),
so real installs accumulate what it can never touch: trees preserved for
untracked-only scratch, and orphaned local branches beyond the two
auto-generated prefixes it deletes. A measured multi-agent box: 35 trees /
15GB / 244 local branches, 120 of them fully merged.
New attended surface (hermes_cli/worktree_gc.py + worktree_cmd.py):
- hermes worktree list — audit every tree: age, size, verdict, reason,
plus deletable-branch count
- hermes worktree prune [--dry-run|--trees-only|--branches-only]
- /worktree prune [--dry-run] — same engine in-session; never touches the
session's own active tree
- startup escalation: one WARNING when .worktrees/ exceeds 10 trees or
5GB, naming the reclaim commands (silence is how boxes hit 15GB)
Safety invariants (shared with the startup pruner via cli.py primitives):
tracked modifications and unique unpushed commits never deleted at any
age; live-locked trees untouched; branch deletion gated on worktree
removal success; untracked-only scratch ARCHIVED to
~/.hermes/archive/worktree-prune/ before its tree is reaped.
Branch GC is content-gated, not name-gated: any local branch fully merged
or git-cherry patch-equivalent upstream is safe to delete (rebase merges
rewrite SHAs, so --merged alone misses the dominant leak); unique-commit,
checked-out, protected, and stale-base (>50 ahead) branches are kept.
Classification is parallel (8 workers) — 244 branches audit in ~64s live.
git timeouts degrade to keep (returncode 124) instead of crashing the
audit — live-verified failure on a 746MB .git repo.
16 behavior-contract tests against real git fixtures; live dry-run on the
production repo: 12 trees reclaimable, 120 branches deletable, 0 false
positives among kept trees.
