feature(branch_archive): move history worth keeping into the Gut, from anywhere - #283

What the audit found

PyAutoHands carries a master alongside main. It is not a stale trunk from a rename:

main   root  cf12459  2023-06-05  "history reset"
master root  7d8743a  2021-02-12  "Add workflow to run integration test"
master tip   55da101  2022-11-27  442 commits

merge-base(main, master) → exit 1, no output      # no common ancestor
git tag --contains 55da101 → (0 tags in the repo)  # nothing else pins it

main was started fresh in June 2023. master is the repo's original history, orphaned by that reset and the only copy of it. Deleting it makes 442 commits unreachable; leaving it is clutter. It is also the only master across all 25 sweepable repos — a one-off, not a pattern.

The Gut exists precisely for this, but pyauto-gut is a CLI and PyAutoGut ships no workflow, so the operation was laptop-only — the same gap this session closed for the sweep.

Deliberately not a mode of the sweep

The sweep's question is "is this already in main?". This workflow's is "is this safely in the Gut yet?". Sharing a code path would put an irreversible delete behind the wrong predicate.

The ordering is the substance

archive  →  VERIFY on the Gut  →  delete

The verification is a fresh ls-remote against the Gut that also checks the landed SHA equals the branch's — not a reading of the push's own exit code. A push that reports success but lands nothing, or lands under a different name, would otherwise be followed by an irreversible delete. Any mismatch aborts with the source branch untouched.

The archive delegates to pyauto-gut archive rather than reimplementing the push, so the Gut keeps ownership of its namespace and its refusal-to-overwrite. Brain drives, Gut holds — the Heart/vitals template.

Other guards

• Target must be a sweepable repo, by the same body-map boundary the sweep uses.
• Archive name must be a plain slug, so it cannot climb out of archive/condemned/.
• A repo's default branch is refused, whatever it is called.

Not included, on purpose

Filing the condemned.md entry. That is Mind state and a judgement: original project history should be held undated — no sweep-after — so no later sweep ever voids it. A workflow should not be deciding that.

Checks

pytest tests/ → 510 passed · check_skill_line_counts.sh → OK · repos_sync.py --check → all 12 green.

Slug guard exercised directly: ../escape, .hidden, empty and has space rejected; pyautohands-pre-2023-history and ok_name.1 accepted.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

https://claude.ai/code/session_01KwqicJpMqmcT5RVbyNwdKq

Generated by Claude Code