OneDro1d scope-retire — archive a notepad, keep the history
Retiring a notepad means "stop treating this as an active objective" — not "delete it".
The journal (sessions/*.jsonl), the handoffs, the memory-index (wing=<prefix>) entries,
and the git remote all stay. Retirement is a reversible status change plus a clean final
snapshot. See ../../DESIGN.md (§6 file contracts, §16 acceptance).
Never destructive. This skill does not rm journals, does not empty the memory index,
does not delete the GitHub repo, and does not force-push over history. If the operator wants
hard deletion, that is a separate manual action they perform themselves — surface it, don't
do it.
Procedure
1. Confirm the notepad and its state
- Resolve the notepad directory (cwd or the operator-named scope). Confirm it is a notepad (has SCOPE.md + repos.manifest.json + sessions/).
- Read SCOPE.md done-criteria and report which are met vs open, so the operator retires with eyes open. Retiring with open criteria is allowed (abandonment) — just say so.
2. Write a final snapshot into NOTES.md
Do one last rewrite of NOTES.md (§6.1): set Current goal to a one-line outcome
("Retired : <done | abandoned because …>"), Next action to "none — scope retired",
and leave the Key refs / Blockers as the honest final state. This is the summary a future
reader lands on first; keep it terse and un-redacted of caveats.
3. Append a retirement milestone to the journal (do NOT rewrite history)
Append one new event to the current session journal
(sessions/<ISO8601>_<id>.jsonl) — never edit or delete existing lines:
{"ts":"<now>","kind":"milestone","text":"scope retired: <outcome>","refs":[],"commit":null,"session":"<id>"}
The append-only journal is the history of record; retirement adds a closing entry, it does not erase what came before.
4. Mark SCOPE.md retired
Add a status line at the top of SCOPE.md, e.g.
> **Status:** RETIRED <date> — <one-line outcome>. This is the durable, human-visible
flag that the notepad is shelved. Leave Objective + Done-criteria in place for the record.
5. Disarm auto-load / auto-sync for future sessions
So a stray future session in this directory doesn't resurrect it as "active":
- In the notepad's
.claude/settings.json, the read/sync hooks key off notepad detection; a RETIRED SCOPE.md is the signal the SessionStart hook should treat as "inject the final NOTES.md snapshot read-only, skip the digest rebuild and best-effort push". Record the retired status where the hook can see it (SCOPE.md status line is the source of truth). - Do not remove the hooks or the settings file — retirement is reversible.
6. Final sync, then leave the remote alone
If a remote exists, do one best-effort git -C <notepad> add -A && commit && push of the
retirement snapshot (final NOTES.md, journal milestone, SCOPE status) so the archived state
is durable off-machine. Then stop — do not delete the remote branch or repo. Preserve
handoffs/ as-is.
Done when
SCOPE.md shows RETIRED with an outcome, NOTES.md holds the final snapshot, the journal has its closing milestone appended (nothing removed), future sessions won't treat it as active, and — if there's a remote — the archived state is pushed. Report: the notepad path, the outcome (done vs abandoned + which done-criteria were open), and that history was preserved (journal + handoffs + memory index untouched).
Guardrails
- Journal is append-only: add the milestone, never edit or delete prior lines.
- No destructive ops: no journal deletion, no memory-index purge, no repo/remote deletion, no force-push. Hard deletion is the operator's own manual call.
- Reversible: a later
scope-initon the same directory re-activates the notepad.