alive:system-cleanup

A maintenance tool for a structured workspace made of areas called walnuts, each containing tasks, notes, and data bundles. It scans the workspace for stale tasks, abandoned folders, old version remnants, and unsaved sessions, then presents issues one at a time.

In plain words
What is it for?
Auditing workspace health, reviewing active tasks, rebuilding the current-state summary for a walnut, and cleaning up stale or orphaned system data.
Why use it?
Workspace clutter and outdated generated data can accumulate and make the system harder to trust. The tool identifies these problems and lets the user choose the recommended fixes.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the alive plugin — 17 skills, 5 hooks shipped together

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/alivecontext/alive/system-cleanup
Any agent
npx skills add alivecontext/alive --skill system-cleanup
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/alivecontext/alive

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install alive, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 17 skills, 5 hooks.

Per session 52 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 5,499 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00052 $0.05499
Opus 5 $0.00026 $0.02750
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.01100
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00550

Measured 3d ago against content hash 738be21d87b4, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

alive:system-cleanup scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 3d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

plugins/alive/skills/system-cleanup/SKILL.md · 528 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 528 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Tidy

System maintenance. Root health first, then one walnut at a time. Surfaces issues with recommended fixes — the human picks.

Not a dashboard (that's world). Not a search (that's find). Not session history (that's alive:session-history). Pure maintenance.


v3 Architecture Reference

Walnut structure is flat under _kernel/:

walnut-name/
  _kernel/
    key.md
    log.md
    insights.md
    tasks.json
    now.json
    completed.json
  bundle-a/
    context.manifest.yaml
    raw/
  bundle-b/
    context.manifest.yaml

There is NO _kernel/_generated/ subdirectory. There is NO bundles/ container directory. Bundles sit as direct children of the walnut root alongside _kernel/.

Task operations go through tasks.py, never by reading/writing task files directly:

  • tasks.py list --walnut {path} — all active tasks as JSON
  • tasks.py list --walnut {path} --status active — filter by status
  • tasks.py summary --walnut {path} — structured summary with counts

Projection rebuilds go through project.py:

  • project.py --walnut {path} — rebuilds _kernel/now.json

Three-Phase Flow

Phase 1: Root Audit (system-level, 7 checks — parallel subagents)
    |
Phase 2: Walnut Summary (single subagent scans frontmatter, human picks)
    |
Phase 3: Deep Audit (one walnut, 12 checks — parallel subagents)

Subagent Strategy (non-negotiable)

Tidy is read-heavy. Every phase uses subagents to keep the main context clean.

Discovery subagents MUST use subagent_type: "Explore" — Explore agents have direct file read access without needing Bash. Use Explore for all Phase 1, Phase 2, and Phase 3 discovery checks.

Fix-execution subagents MUST use subagent_type: "general-purpose" — only general-purpose agents have Write/Edit access. Dispatch one general-purpose agent per approved fix.

  • Phase 1: Dispatch all 7 root checks as parallel subagents. Wait for all. Present results together — one line per passing check, expand on failures only.
  • Phase 2: Single subagent reads all walnut frontmatter, returns the health table.
  • Phase 3: Dispatch all 12 checks as parallel subagents (one check per subagent). Wait for all. Present results together — passing checks collapsed, failures expanded one at a time.

Read the full file on GitHub · 528 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 3d ago First seen · 528 lines · 52 tokens per session scan A 738be21d87b4

Subscribe to this mod's changes

alive:system-cleanup is a skill published in the GitHub repository alivecontext/alive (127 stars, last pushed 7d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 52 tokens to every session and 5,499 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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