Disk Tidy

Find out where a nearly full disk went, then free space without losing anything the owner still needs. You measure and propose; the user decides per item; you clean and prove the gain.

TIDY=<this skill's directory>/scripts/disk_tidy.py (Python 3.9+, standard library only) does the parts that must be exact: free space, well-known locations, and build output that is safe to delete. Use absolute paths.

Ground rules

Each rule protects something that is hard to get back.

• Survey read-only. Nothing is deleted, moved or emptied before the user picks it from the cleanup list. A cleanup the user approved stays within what they picked.
• Never empty the Trash, and say so. Apps and user files go to the Trash so the owner can put them back; the space returns only when the owner empties it.
• Never open credential, token, cookie or chat content. Judge app data, profiles and session folders by name, size and date. If a config points at a key file (for example GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS), report the path, never the contents, and leave the file where it is.
• Check what is in use right before deleting: process working directories (lsof -d cwd), the binary each running session executes, and dev servers. Keep any version a running process uses, the version a launcher links to, and the one before it.
• Delete build output only when git ignores it (git check-ignore). A folder that merely looks like a cache but is tracked or outside git is real work until shown otherwise.
• Prefer each tool's own cleaner (uv cache prune, pnpm store prune, npm cache clean --force, brew cleanup, in-app storage managers) over rm, because it knows what is still referenced.
• du overstates what deletion frees: APFS clones (pnpm, uv and Next.js copy files that way) and hard links are counted once per path. Quote du sizes as estimates and report only the free difference as the result.

Workflow