find-stale-notes

/find-stale-notes — Discover Abandoned Notes

A vault-cleanup aid. Identifies notes that are old AND have nothing linking to them — the most likely candidates for archive/delete. Conservative by default (moderate criteria, see below); presents candidates as a table; never deletes without explicit per-note confirmation.

When to invoke

• User runs /find-stale-notes (primary)
• User says "stale notes", "unused notes", "orphan notes", "veraltete Notes", "Notes aufräumen", "find orphans", "what can I delete?"
• After a vault-import to surface notes that didn't get re-linked

Stale criteria (moderate by default)

A note is a stale candidate when BOTH hold:

1. mtime older than 6 months (180 days) before now
2. list_backlinks(path).length === 0 — no other note in any vault links to it

Optional tighten/loosen via the first user message:

• "konservativ" / "conservative" → require also tags.length === 0 AND frontmatter === null
• "aggressiv" / "aggressive" → relax to 3 months + 0 backlinks (warn user about higher false-positive rate)

Requirements

• mcp__vault-memory__* tools available
• Vault registered, recently indexed (suggest a save if indexed_at is >7d old)

Workflow

Phase 1 — Candidate gathering

1. Choose target vault. If multiple vaults are configured: ask "audit which vault?" (default: active vault from env, else all).
2. Fetch ALL notes via query_frontmatter({where: {path: {$exists: true}}, limit: 2000}) — this returns every note in the vault since every note has a path. Sort the result by mtime ascending (oldest first).
3. Compute the cutoff: cutoff = now - 180 * 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000 (ms epoch).
4. Filter to notes with mtime < cutoff. If 0 candidates: report "no notes older than 6 months — nothing to triage" and exit.
5. For each remaining candidate, call mcp__vault-memory__list_backlinks({vault, path}). Keep only those with backlinks.length === 0.
6. Produce the candidate table.

Phase 2 — Present the table