Archive Agent Notes

Reduce the active decision corpus without erasing history that can still guide work. Judge every note semantically; word count and age are discovery aids, never archive criteria.

Read the contracts

Read the Agent Note rules (.agents/notes/README.md), the archive instructions (.agents/notes/archived/AGENTS.md), and the implemented lifecycle instructions before classifying. Use current code, configuration, package docs, newer Agent Notes, and inbound links to establish whether a rationale still owns or constrains anything.

Check supersession when adding a note

Every new Agent Note triggers a scoped audit of active notes covering the same decision, mechanism, or rejected alternative. Classify each full or partial supersession while writing the new note: archive qualifying implemented notes in the same change, retain and cross-link partial supersessions or independently useful rationale, reject obsolete proposals, and delete rejected notes that no longer prevent a plausible mistake. Do not defer a known match to a later corpus audit.

Classify by future value

• Implemented — keep active: retain a note when its rationale, alternatives, negative guarantees, durable or wire semantics, ownership boundary, security rule, or reintroduction condition is likely to guide a future change. Length does not matter.
• Implemented — archive: archive a note when the shipped decision is complete and its body is unlikely to guide future work, such as one-off UI chrome, a narrow adapter, a minor closed bug, superseded implementation detail, or process history whose current behavior is obvious elsewhere.
• Proposed — never archive: keep a live proposal active; if it is no longer worth pursuing, reject it with an honest reason and satisfy the rejected lifecycle format.
• Rejected — keep only as a guardrail: retain a rejection only when the losing proposal remains a tempting, meaningful mistake and the note explains why it loses.
• Rejected — delete: delete the note when the rejected idea is obsolete, superseded, no longer plausible, or unlikely to prevent re-litigation. Repair or delete inbound links.

Do not archive toward a quota. Classify analogous groups under one principle and use best judgment for close cases.

Archive one implemented note

1. Move the note from implemented/<class>/ to archived/<class>/; implemented is deliberately absent from the archive path.
2. Make no body edits. Insert only Archived: YYYY-MM-DD immediately below Status: implemented, using the archival date.
3. Re-record the seal hashes mechanically for the metadata-only edit: run an verify --write-archive. Do not translate, reformat, update facts, or repair links inside the note.
4. Search for inbound links from active prose. Redirect them to current authority, retarget them to the archived path only when the historical snapshot is intentionally cited, or delete them. Never verify or repair links out of the archived note.
5. Run an verify afterwards; it must pass.

After the note is sealed, never edit, move, translate, reformat, or delete it. Archived notes remain valid inbound-link targets but are historical snapshots, not authority for current behavior.

Validate and report

Run the focused gate tests, npm test, npm run verify, and git diff --check. Report active implemented notes kept, implemented notes archived, rejected notes kept/deleted, proposed notes rejected if any, and every genuinely borderline case with its word count and chosen outcome.