What is ess-git-tidy?

A repository-cleanup workflow that inventories local branches, remote branches, and Git worktrees. A worktree is a separate directory connected to the same repository, and branches are marked as safe to remove, needing approval, or worth keeping.

Use it to review stale branches and worktrees, identify branches already merged into the main branch, and delete only the items you approve.

It replaces a long series of manual Git checks with one report that considers branch history and pull-request status. It avoids deleting items that may still contain unmerged or new work.

ess-git-tidy — Skill for Claude Code and Codex by CiscoDevNet

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.

Any agent

npx skills add CiscoDevNet/essentials --skill ess-git-tidy

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/CiscoDevNet/essentials

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ciscodevnet/essentials/ess-git-tidy/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/ciscodevnet/essentials/ess-git-tidy)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ciscodevnet/essentials/ess-git-tidy"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ciscodevnet/essentials/ess-git-tidy/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ciscodevnet/essentials/ess-git-tidy"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ciscodevnet/essentials/ess-git-tidy.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 125 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 1,598 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.

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.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00125	$0.01598
Opus 5.5	$0.00050	$0.00639
Sonnet 5.5	$0.00025	$0.00320
Haiku 4.5	$0.00013	$0.00160

Measured 2d ago against content hash 430f7a635096, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

ess-git-tidy 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 2d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 3 executable files (scripts/audit.sh, scripts/lib.sh, scripts/test_audit.sh), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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.

skills/ess/ess-git-tidy/SKILL.md · 161 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 161 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Git Tidy

Cleaning up branches by hand means running twenty git commands and holding the answers in your head. This skill puts the inventory and the classification in a script, so the only thing left is judgment: which of the ask-first items you actually want gone.

Quick start

Script paths are relative to this skill's directory.

scripts/audit.sh          # read-only; writes a report

Then read report.md from the printed directory, present it, and act on what the user approves.

What it decides

Every local branch lands in exactly one category. The disposition column is what you may act on without asking.

Category	Meaning	Disposition
`base`	The local integration branch itself	keep
`fresh-start`	Tip is identical to base: work just begun	ask
`merged-ancestor`	Fully contained in base	safe, `git branch -d`
`pr-merged-verified`	Tip matches a merged PR whose merge commit is in the selected base	safe, `git branch -D`
`pr-merged-unreached`	PR merged, but the merge commit is not in the selected base	ask
`pr-merged-diverged`	PR merged, then commits were added	ask
`pr-open`	PR still open	keep
`unmerged-no-pr`	Work in progress, nothing upstream	keep
`superseded`	Contained in another local branch	ask

Worktrees: primary, current, locked, dirty, active, active-open-pr, and a detached checkout of a closed or unreached PR are kept or asked about. prunable (directory gone) and stale-merged (clean, work already in the selected base) are safe.

fresh-start is the one that most tools get wrong. A branch sitting exactly on main looks empty and disposable, but it is almost always someone who just ran git checkout -b and has not committed yet. Deleting it destroys intent, not code, which is why it never enters the safe set.

Workflow

1. Audit

Run from inside the target repo. The script only reads; it deletes nothing.

Read the full file on GitHub · 161 lines

Files

What ships with it

6 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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.

2d ago First seen · 161 lines · 125 tokens per session scan A 430f7a635096

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ess-git-tidy is a skill published in the GitHub repository CiscoDevNet/essentials (7 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 125 tokens to every session and 1,598 once invoked, about $0.0005 per session on Opus 5.5. 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 2026-11-04.

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ess-git-tidy next to 6 skills from other repositories
Mod	Type	Stars	Last push	Licence	Scan	Tokens	Works with
ess-git-tidyCiscoDevNet/essentials	Skill	7	3d ago	Apache-2.0	A	125	Claude Code, Codex
reviewing-blogsappwrite/appwrite	Skill	58k	today	BSD-3-Clause	A	55	Cursor
publish-npm-versionprisma/orm	Skill	48k	today	Apache-2.0	A	182	Claude Code, Codex
triage-contributor-prprisma/orm	Skill	48k	today	Apache-2.0	A	131	Claude Code
contrib-prprisma/orm	Skill	48k	today	Apache-2.0	A	65	Claude Code, Codex
review-implement-phaseprisma/orm	Skill	48k	today	Apache-2.0	A	38	Claude Code
dashboard-chat-best-practicesvercel/eve	Skill	5.8k	today	Apache-2.0	A	84	Codex