sweep

/sweep (bro)

All mechanics live in the bro CLI. This skill is policy only.

bro work sweep is the bead lifecycle's outflow stage: closed beads accumulate forever, and bd prune alone would burn lessons nobody harvested. Sweep gates the burn on a harvest marker.

The contract

• A closed bead is harvested when it carries the sweep:distilled state label (bd set-state <id> sweep=distilled). The marker is the gate's only input — no heuristics, no second channel.
• bro work sweep distill materializes the work instead of judging it: beads already cited as learn evidence auto-mark; the rest pour as an agent molecule (one step per bead — bro flow convoy run / bro fleet agents up executes them).
• bro work sweep run refuses while unharvested closed beads are older than sweep.olderThanDays (default 30). --force is the explicit override — the refusal is the feature, so use it only when the burn is intended. A closed bead with no closed_at also blocks: a row that can't be dated can't be proven safe.

Commands

Command	What it does
bro work sweep status	Read-only: harvested/unharvested counts, age vs olderThanDays, the would-burn set
bro work sweep distill [--dry-run]	Auto-mark learn-cited beads; pour an agent molecule for the rest
bro work sweep run [--dry-run] [--force] [--no-flatten]	Gate → archive → sync-verify → bd prune --older-than → bd flatten

Pipeline stages (run)

1. Gate — unharvested beads past olderThanDays block the run.
2. Archive — bd export JSONL + a per-bead provenance log dump (bd prune deletes provenance rows with the bead — the dump is the only place the bead→SHA/PR bindings survive).
3. Sync-verify — the archive must commit to refs/bro/data and be present in the ref tree, or run stops before pruning. sweep.dir must resolve inside the synced set (.agents/ or the debt dir) — anywhere else warns in status and refuses in run.
4. Prune — bd prune --older-than <N>d --force. bd's protections apply unchanged: pinned, open, ephemeral, and open-bead-cited rows skip.
5. Flatten — bd flatten squashes Dolt history + full GC (the space reclaim). sweep.flatten: false or --no-flatten skips it.

Policy

• Wire bro work sweep run into loop end-of-queue or scheduled flows — the gate makes unconditional invocation safe.
• BRO_SWEEP_DIR overrides sweep.dir; keep it inside .agents/ or archives stop syncing and run refuses.
• Memories never leave the local store (bd export excludes them) — the archive is issue content + provenance, nothing sensitive.
• bd set-state leaves one residue event bead per mark; those are ephemeral-class and outside bd prune scope — accepted, not a bug.