Reap orphaned goals

/clear creates a new Claude Code session ID. Any goal tied to the old session ID is orphaned — no live session is driving it anymore. The row stays in goals.db until you reap it.

See orphans

/goal-cleanup --list

Shows every orphaned goal regardless of age:

orphaned goals:
  id=12  status=paused           started=2026-05-10 14:22  age=2d 1h
  id=18  status=active           started=2026-05-11 09:45  age=18h
  id=23  status=budget_limited   started=2026-05-12 03:11  age=22m

age is computed from started_at to now.

Filter by age

/goal-cleanup --list --older-than 24

Show orphans older than 24 hours. Useful when you’ve just run /clear and want to see only the truly stale rows.

Delete

/goal-cleanup --delete

Default behavior — deletes orphans older than 24 hours. The 24h default is intentional protection so you don’t accidentally clobber a recent paused goal you might want to resume.

/goal-cleanup --delete --older-than 1

Override the default — delete orphans older than 1 hour. Useful after a session of heavy /clear usage.

/goal-cleanup --delete --older-than 0

Nuclear option — delete every orphan. Logs each delete to goal_events so the audit trail survives.

What gets deleted

Only goals that are:

1. Owned by a session ID that no longer matches any live session (i.e. orphaned)
2. Not the current session’s active goal (never deletes your live work)
3. Older than the --older-than threshold

The goals row, all matching goal_events, and any subagent_token_cursors are removed in a single transaction.

Forensic recovery

If you delete a row you wanted to keep, the audit log is gone — but goal_events writes are fsync’d through WAL, so a database file backup taken before the delete still has the data. If you take periodic backups of ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_DATA}/goals.db, you can restore.

sqlite3 $CLAUDE_PLUGIN_DATA/goals.db ".backup /tmp/goals-pre-cleanup.db"

…before any large cleanup is a cheap insurance policy.

When to keep orphans

If you do iterative goal work and use /clear frequently as a checkpoint, you may want the orphan rows around — they’re a good /goal-history --all audit trail. The 24h --older-than default already accommodates that.

/goal-cleanup --list is read-only and cheap. Run it whenever you wonder “did I leave a goal hanging?”