Routine Cleanup for Claude Code

Scheduled tasks (routines) in the Claude desktop app leave a session behind every time they run. An hourly routine makes 700+ sessions a month. They pile up in the routine's Runs list, take disk space, and slow the app down when it loads them. Until now, the only way to remove them was one click at a time.

Routine Cleanup is a Claude Code skill that prunes a routine's old runs in bulk:

• Keeps the newest N runs you choose.
• Never touches a run you replied in. It reads each transcript and only counts what a person actually typed, not skill loads, tool output, or background notifications.
• Shows the full plan first and deletes nothing until you approve it.
• Deletes through the desktop app itself, so the Runs list updates immediately, instead of leaving "Session not found on disk" ghosts behind.

First: stop the 30-day expiry from deleting your history

Claude Code already deletes old session data on its own. Anything under ~/.claude older than cleanupPeriodDays is swept: transcripts, subagent transcripts, checkpoint snapshots, plans. The default is 30 days, so a terminal session you want to resume or search next month is gone.

Desktop app sessions (including routine runs) are kept at any age since Claude Code v2.1.248, unless you set desktopSessionCleanupPeriodDays. Earlier versions deleted them after cleanupPeriodDays too, and the sweep removes only the transcript, not the app's Runs entry. That leaves runs you can no longer open, which this skill reports as "unverifiable".

An age cutoff can't tell the sessions you care about from routine noise, so it deletes both. We recommend turning the expiry up so nothing is lost to age, and pruning routine runs with this skill instead:

// ~/.claude/settings.json
{ "cleanupPeriodDays": 3650 }

Leave desktopSessionCleanupPeriodDays unset. (0 is not "keep forever": Claude Code rejects it. The minimum is 1.) The planner prints a reminder when your setting is below a year.

What a plan looks like

Routine        : Nightly report
scheduledTaskId: nightly-report
Total runs     : 618

Plan (keeping newest 4):

AUTONOMOUS (no human reply)       332 runs   403.3 MB  WILL DELETE  2026-07-16 .. 2026-10-02
ENGAGED (a human replied)          43 runs   120.0 MB  PROTECTED (needs --include-engaged)
UNVERIFIABLE (transcript gone)    239 runs    47.2 MB  PROTECTED (needs --include-unverifiable)

Selected for deletion: 332 runs, 403.3 MB, in 14 batches of <=25

PLAN ONLY: nothing was deleted. Deletion goes through the app's delete_session tool.

Install

As a plugin (Claude Code CLI or the desktop app's Code tab):

/plugin marketplace add naw103/claude-routine-cleanup
/plugin install routine-cleanup@routine-cleanup

As a plain skill: copy skills/routine-cleanup/ to ~/.claude/skills/routine-cleanup/.

git clone https://github.com/naw103/claude-routine-cleanup
cp -r claude-routine-cleanup/skills/routine-cleanup ~/.claude/skills/

Requires Python 3.9+ (standard library only) and the Claude desktop app.

Use

In an ordinary conversation in the Code tab (not inside a routine run):

/routine-cleanup nightly-report keep 10

or just ask: "clean up my bug-fix routine's old runs, keep the last 10".

Claude lists your routines, confirms which one you mean, shows the plan, and waits for your yes. The app then shows its own approval card for each batch of 25 runs.

How it decides what to delete

Each run lands in one bucket:

Also never selected: the newest N runs, the conversation you are in, and any run active in the last 15 minutes.

If your old transcripts were pruned by Claude Code's cleanupPeriodDays and you are happy to delete those runs too, either say so when asked or make it the default:

// ~/.claude/routine-cleanup.json
{ "include_unverifiable": true }

Why it deletes through the app

Two things learned the hard way, so you don't have to:

1. Deleting the files directly does not work. The desktop app keeps the Runs list in memory and writes a run's record back when it saves or you click the run. You get "Session not found on disk" entries that won't go away. So the bundled script only plans; Claude deletes through the app's own delete_session tool.
2. That tool is off inside routine runs, and accepts 25 sessions per call. So the skill runs from a normal conversation and works in batches of 25.

Known limitation: 25 runs per approval

The desktop app's delete tool accepts at most 25 sessions per call, and every call shows its own approval card. That limit is the app's, not this skill's, and there is no way around it: deleting the files directly is exactly what leaves the ghost entries described above.

In practice:

To make it less tedious, Claude sends several batches at once, so the cards arrive together and you can approve them one after another without waiting between them. The plan tells you the batch count up front, so you know how many clicks it will be before you start. Runs only pile up this far once; after the first cleanup, running it every few weeks keeps it to a card or two.

If you know a way to delete more per call, or Anthropic raises the limit, please open an issue.

The planner on its own

skills/routine-cleanup/cleanup_runs.py never deletes anything, so it is safe to run by hand to see where your disk went:

python3 skills/routine-cleanup/cleanup_runs.py                       # list routines
python3 skills/routine-cleanup/cleanup_runs.py --routine ID --keep 10 --brief
python3 skills/routine-cleanup/cleanup_runs.py --routine ID --keep 10 --json

Environment overrides: CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR (default ~/.claude) and ROUTINE_CLEANUP_APP_DIR (default: the app's data dir for your OS).

Platform notes

Built and tested on macOS with the Claude desktop app. The app data paths for Windows (%APPDATA%\Claude) and Linux (~/.config/Claude) follow the app's usual layout but are untested; ROUTINE_CLEANUP_APP_DIR overrides them. Issues and PRs welcome.

Development

python3 -m unittest discover -s tests -v
claude plugin validate . --strict

License

MIT. Not affiliated with Anthropic.