scythe

Problem

A laptop you code on every day slowly fills up with things you forgot: old dependency folders, abandoned virtual environments, compiler output from projects you have not opened in months. It adds up to tens of gigabytes. The tools that clean it up each handle a single language, so a folder with a bit of everything means several tools, or an afternoon of hunting by hand.

Solution

scythe walks through your projects folder, recognises what each project is built with, and tells you how much space its leftovers take. It understands Node, Python, Rust, Java, Go, Ruby and .NET in a single pass.

When you are ready, it cleans up. Nothing disappears without a preview and a confirmation first, there is a trial mode that only shows the plan, and anything it deletes goes to a trash you can restore from. You can narrow it down by language, age or size, export a report for scripts, or browse everything in an interactive screen.

pipx install artifact-scythe
scythe scan ~/projects

Approach

A plain Python command-line tool, with a terminal interface for those who would rather click through than type. It is published on PyPI and as a Docker image that runs on both Intel and ARM machines.

Trade-offs & bottlenecks

Deleting files is the whole point, so I put safety ahead of speed. The preview, the confirmation and the trash each cost you a step, and they are there on purpose.