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HarneryHarnery

0199: Remove one owned artifact immediately

Status: accepted (2026-10-06)

Context

Section titled “Context”

An agent can finish reviewing a large disposable workspace while its retention window still has days left. discard shortens that window but deletes nothing immediately. clean --yes selects work across the repository. Neither gives the agent an immediate removal command limited to the workspace it owns.

Alternatives considered

Section titled “Alternatives considered”
  • Delete payload with guarded file removal and leave the manifest for later cleanup. This frees disk, but requires enumerating payload and leaves an empty workspace behind.
  • Expire the workspace and run repository cleanup. This introduces a wait and can delete unrelated eligible workspaces.
  • Allow an arbitrary force removal. This bypasses holds and other agents’ work.

Decision

Section titled “Decision”

Add removeArtifact() and artifacts remove <ref> --reason <text> [--yes]. Preview is the default. Apply deletes one complete workspace without requiring expired retention or an idle owner. The actor must match the creating owner; unknown identities and ownerless workspaces refuse removal.

Reuse artifact classification, the mutation lock, and deletion records. Refuse holds in force, tracked content, unsafe coordination state, peer claims, symlinks, mount boundaries, special files, and nested repository or artifact stores, and the caller’s working directory or its ancestors. Fingerprint the complete tree and recheck protections immediately before deletion. There is no force or actor override in the CLI.

Result and limits

Section titled “Result and limits”

The caller still decides whether evidence is disposable and stops its writers. The lock serializes metadata and cleanup, but ordinary payload writers do not take it. Inspection detects changes during the scan; it is not a filesystem transaction against a writer racing the final removal.

Successful removal reports deleted: true. The existing best-effort deletion log also records the reason and actor; a log failure cannot undo deletion. Normal release, discard, retention, and repository cleanup behavior stays intact.