chore(inbox): park the auto-empty-working proposal with a narrower fix

Craig's roam capture reached me a second time, relayed from another project, and the sender asked what already existed before treating it as new. Three of its four asks had already shipped, one of them earlier today from the same capture.

The remaining ask is an automatic sweep of a closed task's working/ files into temp/. I'm recommending against it. temp/ is cleared at the next wrap, so the sweep would destroy the artifacts that working-files.md says to rename and file into assets/. Filing is also the moment you decide what each artifact is worth keeping as, and automating it skips that.

The real gap is smaller: orphan detection only runs during a sentry fire, so a project that never runs sentry never hears about it. The parked diff adds report-only detection to wrap-up.

1 files changed, 15 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/todo.org b/todo.org
index 75bac4c..2233b86 100644
--- a/todo.org
+++ b/todo.org
@@ -89,6 +89,21 @@ Craig approved 2026-07-23. Applied to =claude-templates/.ai/notes.org= and synce
 CLOSED: [2026-07-23 Thu]
 Craig approved 2026-07-23. Added =*** Clear temp/= to =wrap-it-up.org= Step 3, after the archive pass, and synced to the mirror. Two guards: confirm before deleting anything that reads as in-progress rather than throwaway (that belongs in =working/=, so move it there), and skip entirely where =temp/= isn't gitignored, since that means the project uses the directory for something else. This closes the last open clause of his 2026-07-20 working/temp capture.
 
+** VERIFY [#B] Parked: auto-empty working/ when a task closes (from work)
+:PROPERTIES:
+:LAST_REVIEWED: 2026-07-23
+:END:
+What arrived: your roam capture relayed via work — every project carries working/ and temp/, and when a task completes its working/ files are automatically ("via a soft hook if possible") archived or moved to temp/. The sender flagged that most of this may already exist and asked for a check before treating it as net-new.
+
+Recommendation: accept the intent, reject the mechanism. Three of the four asks already shipped — working/ tracked from creation and temp/ gitignored (2026-07-20), and temp/ cleared at wrap (today, 10ea44b, from this same capture). Only the auto-empty is new, and I'd not build it as described.
+
+Two reasons. Moving a closed task's artifacts to temp/ destroys them, because temp/ is cleared at the next wrap, while working-files.md says those artifacts get renamed individually and filed flat into assets/ with meaningful names. And filing is deliberately a judgment step: it forces a review of each artifact's permanent value, which is what keeps assets/ searchable and catches the ones not worth keeping. Automating it removes exactly that review. Tonight is the live case — I closed four parked VERIFY tasks and filed their working/ dirs by hand, checking for inbound links and confirming the content stayed recoverable in git first. An automatic sweep would have destroyed four prepared diffs at the next wrap.
+
+The real gap is narrower: orphan detection exists only inside a sentry fire (pass 6), so a project that never runs sentry never gets the nudge. The prepared diff adds that detection to wrap-up as a report-only step, which serves the intent without the destruction. Verified against this repo's live tree.
+
+Prepared diff: [[file:working/working-dir-orphan-check/proposed.diff]] — apply is mechanical on your go.
+Say "approve the parked orphan check" (or adjust / reject) and it gets applied.
+
 ** TODO [#B] No two language bundles compose any more — polyglot is now refused :feature:spec:
 :PROPERTIES:
 :LAST_REVIEWED: 2026-07-23