Pruning

A brain that grows forever stops being read. Prune it.

Brains accumulate. Lessons repeat, goals go stale, files nobody reads slow down every corpus load and every embedding pass. The prune surface removes the weight on purpose.

CLI

Preview what would go:

vant prune --dry-run

Apply it:

vant prune

Prune targets stale version folders, superseded files, and fluff content, with retention policies controlling how much history stays.

Programmatic

const prune = require('./lib/prune');
const result = await prune.run({ dryRun: true });

The result reports what was found and what was removed before anything is deleted, so the dry-run result can be reviewed in automation.

Practice

Prune on a schedule, not on a feeling. The cron surface can drive it periodically:

vant cron list

Shows scheduled jobs; add a prune job through vant cron. Keep the interval honest: a monthly prune of an active brain is usually enough, and the dry-run result makes each pass reviewable before it is destructive.