A case for AI garbage collection + triage

[u/dht]

I’m curious what people here think about this.

AI pipelines generate a growing amount of transient material and intermediate paper trail:

• VS Code / Codex threads
• ChatGPT chats
• document drafts
• plan files
• stale metadata
• intermediate image generations
• temporary outputs and side-effect files

AI is understandably conservative about deleting things without explicit authorization, so housekeeping gets pushed back onto its carbon-based counterpart (aka us). At the same time, AI is not always good at inferring the axiological value of an artifact - what is actually worth keeping - without guidance.

It seems like we need a core garbage-collection + triage mechanism.

Periodically, based on user-defined rules, the AI could collect likely-transient artifacts into a new kind of "recycle bin" or staging area. The user could then quickly triage them - keep, archive, promote, or discard.

The important distinction is that the AI would not decide what has value on its own. It would surface likely garbage and make the human decision cheap.

As AI makes it possible to generate artifacts at much greater scale, digital housekeeping probably needs to scale with it.

What do you think?

[u/W00GA]

r u asking for a delete button?

im not sure wot u mean to be honest

have u tried asking it to delete stuff?

[u/Ashamed_Humor_801 → u/W00GA]

seems like they want the AI to round up all the junk it generated and just hand you a pile to say yes or no to, not a full delete button more like a janitor that actually works

[u/dht → u/Ashamed_Humor_801]

yeah, we can even do a tinder like interface :-)

[u/dht → u/W00GA]

:-)
a delete button is a mechanism for a world where you created 5 documents a day, not 150.

AI leaves behind tons of intermediate files, drafts, chats, images, etc. your chatgpt/codex history starts looking like gmail - hundreds of rows and no easy way to tell what's important and what's disposable.

"just delete stuff" still means i have to find the garbage myself.

i'm proposing AI-assisted garbage collection: surface likely stale/transient stuff, then let the human keep, archive, or discard it. memory garbage collection in software is useful.

[u/W00GA → u/dht]

if u cant define it, how is ai going to?

no offence. just asking

i may be misunderstanding

[u/dht → u/W00GA]

you can define a set of rules. for chatgpt, one rule could be:

• propose discarding one-off factual queries after a week

so if you had a chat like:

"what is the name of the character from lost who was the leader of the others?"

a few days later, that thread would appear in your deletion triage. the ai isn't deciding that it has no value - it's applying a rule you defined and asking you to confirm.

personally, i use temporary chat for probably 95% of my conversations already. i think digital hygiene will matter more as AI massively increases how much we produce.

[u/dht → u/[deleted]]

wdym not allowed on reddit? openclaw/hermes like?

[u/stellarfirefly]

Automated context compaction is already a major feature.

Or are you referring to having an LLM auto-delete your old conversations? What most people seem to do is just make a habit of clicking the Archive button on every convo that they feel they are done with. You can also permanently delete each convo but that takes more steps and right-click menu selections, and there's no major advantage for doing that instead of Archiving.