stale-card-sweeplisted
Install: claude install-skill home-dev-lab/workflow-toolbox
# stale-card-sweep — flag what a closing diff just made stale
## Why this exists
A card is created for a defect. Before it is picked up, a different, larger card gets
implemented and covers the same ground. The first card stays open. Nothing connects "this
diff just landed" to "these open cards describe exactly what it fixed" — until someone
happens to notice by eye and writes it down by hand. That noticing does not repeat reliably.
Measured cost of the gap this skill closes: a pilot spawned on a card whose work had already
shipped in an earlier commit produced an empty branch — ~209,000 tokens spent discovering, the
hard way, that the card should have been flagged stale at the closure of the covering card. A
`grep`-cheap mechanical check would have cost nothing.
## When to run this
At the moment a card is about to move to its terminal "closed" list (`Done`/`NotDoing` on this
project's board convention — adapt to whatever the tracker calls closed). Run it **before**
the move, using the closing card's own diff.
## A second trigger: at COMMIT time, advisory and silent
The mechanism above only ever fires at card CLOSURE. Work done outside any card — an inline
instruction, done directly, closing nothing — never triggers it, and cards it just made
obsolete stay open. `toolkit/scripts/git-hooks/post-commit-stale-card-sweep.sh` closes that
gap: it runs the SAME layer-1 `sweep()` mechanism after every commit, opt-in (see the script's
own header for the install step), silent un