Unmerged Work Census

Unmerged-Work Census

Overview

On a repo worked by many agents and sessions, real work goes missing in predictable places: branches nobody opened a PR for, PRs whose descriptions stopped matching their branches, long-lived containers holding stale clones, and history rewrites that make old branches look "ahead" when their content already landed. A census sweeps every hiding place and — the hard part — proves for each find whether it is genuinely unlanded or just a ghost of rewritten history.

The sweep (run all of it — each check finds a different class)

1. Open PRs: verify the description against the branch

PR descriptions rot. A PR opened as "docs-only audit" can accumulate thousands of lines of implementation as the session continued pushing to its branch.

git fetch origin --prune
git diff --stat origin/master...origin/<pr-branch>     # what the PR REALLY contains
git log origin/master..origin/<pr-branch> --oneline    # commits after the description was written

Treat the diff, not the description, as the PR's content. This single check is how "docs PRs" hiding full feature builds get found.

2. Remote branches with no PR at all

git branch -r --no-merged origin/master                # candidates
git log origin/master..origin/<branch> --oneline       # what's on each

Cross-reference against the PR list; branches with commits but no PR are the classic forgotten-work bucket.

3. Separate real uniqueness from history-rewrite ghosts

After a force-push/rebase/squash era, old branches show as "ahead" even though their content landed under new SHAs. git cherry compares by patch-id, not SHA:

git cherry origin/master origin/<branch> | grep -c '^+'   # patches NOT upstream by content

But patch-id comparison also fails across rewrites that changed context lines, so a high count is a lead, not a verdict. Spot-verify: pick the branch's most important changes and check the target branch for the actual content —

git show origin/master:<path> | grep -n "<distinctive line from the branch's change>"
git ls-tree origin/master <dir>                            # does the module/file exist at all?

Only after spot-verification say "content re-landed, branch is a ghost" or "genuinely unmerged". Also list files that exist ONLY on the old branch:

git diff origin/master <branch> --name-status -- <dirs> | grep '^A'

Files added going master→branch exist on the branch but not master — each one is either superseded-by-rename or lost work. Adjudicate individually.

4. Local state of the clone you're standing in

Long-lived agent containers accumulate drift invisibly:

git status --porcelain          # uncommitted + untracked
git stash list                  # parked work
git branch -vv                  # local branches: ahead/behind their upstreams
git worktree list               # secondary worktrees
git fsck --no-reflogs --lost-found | head   # dangling commits (often discarded temps)

A local master that is "ahead N, behind M" of origin is a stale snapshot from before a history rewrite — census it with steps 3's tools, don't assume either way.

5. Odd branches

Automation branches (*/checkpoints/*, backup refs, bot branches) may hold session transcripts or snapshots rather than code — git ls-tree -r --name-only them before counting them as work.

6. Beyond this clone (multi-agent blind spot)

Every remote/cloud agent session gets its own clone; work a session never pushed exists only inside its container and is invisible to every other session and to this census. So report the census as "everything visible from the remote", and name the unreachable places: other sessions' containers, teammates' laptops, and any deploy target whose working copy can drift from git.

Output form

A table per find: where (branch/stash/local), what (one-line content summary from the actual diff), unique? (verified how), age/last commit, recommended disposition (rescue via rebase+PR / confirm-superseded then delete / needs owner decision). Never recommend deleting anything whose uniqueness you did not spot-verify.

Pitfalls

• Trusting git cherry counts raw — rewrites inflate them; spot-verify content.
• Trusting PR descriptions — diff the branch (step 1).
• Declaring "nothing lost" from SHA comparisons alone.
• rm -rf-ing or force-deleting anything during a census — a census is read-only; disposition is a separate, owner-approved step.
• Forgetting --prune on fetch: deleted-upstream branches linger locally and double-count.

Combining with other skills

• finding-forensic-remediation — turn each rescued finding into an actionable fix item.
• temporal-finding-validation — timeline discipline when dating when work diverged.
• deploy-log-forensics — whether merged work actually deployed is a separate question this census does not answer.