lockdownmedia/chaff

Claude Code plugin ·
MCP for any agent ·
Safety model ·
Roadmap ·
Contributing ·
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**Welcome.** If your laptop fans are screaming, your disk is mysteriously full, and you have a
dozen agent worktrees you're afraid to delete — chaff is for you. It looks at everything your
toolchains leave behind, works out what is still alive, and tells you exactly what each
cleanup would cost before it touches anything.
Quick start
You need **macOS, Linux or Windows** and **Node 20 or newer**
(platform notes). No config, no dependencies.
Just want a look? This runs it without installing anything, and changes nothing:
Keeping it:
Or with Homebrew (macOS and Linux):
The npm package name includes the scope: npm install chaff finds nothing.
Run from inside a project, chaff scans that repo and its siblings. Run from your home folder,
it scans no projects at all. To cover your whole machine from anywhere, point it at your code
folders once with chaff config --set=roots=~/code (several: --set=roots=~/code,~/work).
If it doesn't work first time, see Troubleshooting.
Like what you see? Add it to
Claude Code for a live statusline, or wire it into
any MCP agent. Everything it deletes goes to a
trash you can restore from.
How it works
chaff finds every build process, daemon, cache, build output, package store and git
worktree across your projects — JS/TS, Rust, Go, .NET, JVM, Python, Unity, Unreal — works out
which are still alive, and sorts the rest into three tiers by how much it would hurt to
reclaim.
Built for the case where you have a dozen agent worktrees in flight, half a dozen build
daemons you didn't know were running, and no way to tell which is safe to kill.
Why
nx reset clears one workspace at a time. cargo clean clears one crate. ps | grep node
tells you a process exists but not which project owns it or whether anything still needs it. du -sh * takes five minutes
and doesn't know what's regenerable. Orphan-process reapers don't understand build tools,
and none of them can tell an idle daemon from one with a build in flight.
chaff attributes every process to a project by walking the process tree in both directions,
sizes every regenerable artifact in one batched pass, ages every worktree by its last commit,
and tells you what each cleanup would actually cost you.
The three tiers
| Tier | Meaning | What it costs |
| --- | --- | --- |
| **1 — dead** | The project, worktree, or parent process it belongs to no longer exists | Nothing. It is already garbage. |
| **2 — idle** | Nothing running against it, nothing touched it recently | One cold rebuild, or a re-download. |
| **3 — live** | Touches a running task, an active build, or uncommitted work | Potentially real work. Never automatic. |
Entries marked [locked], [in use], or [building] are shown but **never executed**, even
with --force.
What it found on the machine it was built for
One laptop, mid-afternoon, during ordinary parallel agent work:
And the things nothing was reporting at all:
What it tracks
**Processes** — nx daemons and workers, turbo daemons, tsserver, watchman, metro, esbuild,
swc, tsc, jest/vitest/playwright/cypress, next/vite/webpack/nodemon/storybook/wrangler,
eslint/prettier/biome, plus JVM/Gradle daemons, dotnet/MSBuild/OmniSharp, Go, Cargo,
Python, Unity and Unreal editors. Each is attributed to the project that owns it.
**Build artifacts, by ecosystem**
| | cache | output |
| --- | --- | --- |
| JS/TS | .nx .turbo .angular .parcel-cache .vite .rollup.cache .rspack-cache .webpack-cache .cache | .next .svelte-kit .astro .output .expo dist build coverage storybook-static |
| Rust / JVM | .gradle | target |
| .NET | | obj |
| Python | __pycache__ .pytest_cache .mypy_cache .ruff_cache .tox | |
| Unity | Library Temp | |
| Unreal | Intermediate DerivedDataCache | Binaries |
| Xcode / iOS | | build next to *.xcodeproj, *.xcworkspace or Podfile (labelled xcode) |
| Dart / Flutter | .dart_tool | build next to pubspec.yaml (labelled flutter) |
| Zig | .zig-cache zig-cache | zig-out |
target, obj, Library, Temp, Intermediate, Binaries, .dart_tool and the Zig
directories are **gated on a project marker** in the same directory — Cargo.toml, *.csproj,
ProjectSettings + Assets, *.uproject, pubspec.yaml, build.zig. Without the marker they are never counted, never
mind deleted. bin/ is excluded outright: too many repos keep real scripts there.
**Shared stores** — pnpm, npm, yarn, Go module + build cache, NuGet, pip (all safely
prunable); Cargo registry, Gradle, Maven, Playwright and Puppeteer browsers, Xcode