Task closeout

Leave the tree with the task's useful changes and nothing else, and leave the next person what they cannot reconstruct. Apply this to the files this task created or changed; finishing a task does not authorize a repository-wide cleanup.

1. Inventory. Inspect the diff and new files, including untracked ones. Mark each as kept, removed, or someone else's.
2. Stop and remove what you started. Stop the processes, servers and watchers the task started, and close its browser tabs, also when the task failed or was cancelled. Delete task-created scratch files and generated media that have no remaining use. Keep user work and files of unknown origin until their owner and disposition are known. Never use broad clean or reset commands to make the tree look clean. Honor legal, audit, release and repository retention requirements.
3. Check what goes public. Review additions for private material (personal paths, credentials, session context, private project or client names, and internal infrastructure: secret-store names and what they hold, private repositories and their paths, hosts, accounts) and for completion claims no check supports. Editing published text doesn't remove it: hosts such as GitHub keep earlier versions, so delete, close and replace, or rewrite an unmerged branch. If sensitive material is already committed or published, removing the working copy does not repair it: surface it for a security response without reproducing it.
4. Docs. When the task touched documentation, finish documentation-hygiene's close-out checks.
5. Report. Give the useful changes, the checks run with their results, and the material gaps in the reply. Not a new cleanup report by default.
6. Learn from repeats. When the same correction came up again, find why the existing feedback missed it and propose a safeguard where it belongs (a validation rule, clearer ownership, better instructions), with what it would catch and what it leaves to judgment. Get approval before adding enforcement beyond the task.

Load a reference only for its task:

• A handoff or session summary for whoever continues: handoff.md.
• Retiring a branch, worktree or remote ref: branch-retirement.md. Local and remote deletion each need their own explicit authorization.

Done when

• every file the task created is kept with a reason, or removed;
• the diff holds no private material and no unsupported claim;
• the reply lists the checks run and the gaps left.

This procedure grants no publication, history-rewrite or deletion authority beyond the user's task.