Your Claude Code routine left 618 sessions behind. Mine deletes them while I sleep.

One line from a Show HN thread has been living in my head: "Claude Code's scheduled tasks (routines) leaves a session behind on every run and in the desktop app you can only delete them one at a time. We had 618 open sessions in just one routine."

An hourly routine makes 700+ sessions a month. They pile up in the routine's Runs list, eat disk, and slow the app down when it loads them — and the only official way to remove them is clicking delete 618 times.

So I built the other shape of the fix: not a skill you drive by hand, but a zero-dependency CLI that runs unattended on a schedule and prunes the pile by policy.

routine-sweeper — pip install routine-sweeper ( GitHub, PyPI )

routine-sweeper status # paths, is the app running, counts routine-sweeper scan # list routine runs and their status routine-sweeper sweep # print the deletion plan (changes nothing) routine-sweeper sweep --yes # apply it Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode How it finds routine runs Every session is an append-only JSONL transcript under ~/.claude/projects/<project>/<session-id>.jsonl. A routine-started session opens with a kickoff message of the form:

<scheduled-task name= "my-routine" file= "..." > Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode The sweeper streams each transcript once: the kickoff identifies the routine, and any later human-typed message marks the run "engaged". Deletion removes the transcript, its sidecar directory, and its entry in the ~/.claude/sessions/ live registry.

The desktop app keeps its Runs list in memory. Delete a run's files while the app is running and the app can write its in-memory record back to disk — the run comes back as a "Session not found on disk" ghost. So sweep --yes refuses while the app is running. Schedule it when the app is closed:

# every night at 3:05am, keep 10 newest runs per routine 5 3 * * * routine-sweeper sweep --yes >> ~/.claude/sweeper.log 2>&1 Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode When the app is closed its in-memory list is rebuilt from disk on next launch, so swept runs stay gone. If you want instant deletion while the app is open, that's a different tool: naw103's claude-routine-cleanup skill deletes through the app's own session tool with per-batch approval cards. Ours is for the pile never growing back.

Also in the neighborhood: sdlc-skills ' config-gc — a skill that garbage collects Claude Code config bloat with a strict "never delete autonomously, every candidate gets [y/n/skip]" rule. Different domain, opposite posture: routine-sweeper is designed for unattended scheduled runs, with protection expressed as policy instead of per-item prompts.

The transcript format is internal and undocumented — detection rests on the kickoff marker as observed today, and if a future Claude Code release changes it, the tool does nothing rather than guess. Deletion is permanent; there is no trash. And Claude Code's own cleanupPeriodDays (default 30) already prunes old history by age — the sweeper is for the runs you want gone sooner, or deliberately kept longer.

Stdlib only, everything local, MIT licensed. 17 fixture-based tests, all green. If your routines have been quietly stacking up sessions for months — this is the cron job.