Reclaim

AI-guided disk-reclamation engine for developers. Local-first · macOS + Linux · reversible · faster than du.

Reclaim safely finds and removes regenerable developer clutter — node_modules, .venv, build caches, target/, __pycache__, .next — while never touching irreplaceable work, with full explainability and one-command undo.

The wedge: every byte we remove is regenerable. We never delete your work — we reclaim only what your machine can rebuild. Nothing is ever rm'd; it's moved to a journaled quarantine you can undo byte-for-byte.

Demo

The same loop as text (a throwaway sandbox — status → plan → apply → undo):

$ reclaim status ~/dev
scanned 4 files in 5 dirs (0 skipped) in 0.01s · 32 workers · posix

Reclaimable: 9.6 MB of 9.6 MB on disk · 0 project(s)

🟢 Regenerable         9.6 MB  3 unit(s)
🟡 Regenerable-costly   0.0 B  0 unit(s)
🔴 Protected                —  0 project(s) with uncommitted/unpushed work

$ reclaim plan ~/dev --include-costly
Plan — reclaim 9.6 MB across 3 unit(s), 3 files

  size  unit              path                    rebuild
4.4 MB  🟢 node_modules   /…/webapp/node_modules  npm install
3.1 MB  🟢 .venv          /…/api/.venv            pip install -r requirements.txt
2.1 MB  🟢 target (rust)  /…/rustcli/target       cargo build

$ reclaim apply ~/dev --include-costly --yes
✓ reclaimed 9.6 MB across 3 unit(s) — op 20260707-144439-443c92
undo anytime with reclaim undo 20260707-144439-443c92

$ reclaim undo
✓ restored 3 unit(s) op 20260707-144439-443c92

The GIF is generated reproducibly from a checked-in script rather than hand-recorded, so it cannot drift out of date — see demo/ (vhs demo/reclaim.tape).

Install

Reclaim is a single CLI. The recommended install is pipx (isolated, on your PATH):

pipx install reclaim-disk

The distribution is named reclaim-disk because reclaim was taken on PyPI. The command you run is still reclaim.

With uv: uv tool install reclaim-disk · Or plain pip install reclaim-disk. To track main instead of a release: pipx install "git+https://github.com/anuragchaubey1224/ReClaim".

Optional AI co-pilot (reclaim chat) — the engine works fully without it:

pipx install "reclaim-disk[ai]"

python3 -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e ".[dev]"
pytest                       # 243 tests

Quickstart

# 1. see what's reclaimable (read-only) — tiers + per-project fact sheets
reclaim status ~/dev

# 2. preview a plan for a goal (never mutates)
reclaim plan ~/dev --free 20G

# 3. reclaim it — scan → plan → safety gate → confirm → quarantine (undoable)
reclaim apply ~/dev --free 20G

# 4. inspect / undo / permanently free
reclaim ls
reclaim undo <op-id>          # or just `reclaim undo` for the latest
reclaim purge --older-than 7  # the only true delete, past a TTL

Useful flags: --include-costly (also take 🟡), --dormant-only, --kind node_modules, --min-size 100M, --yes (skip the prompt). The quarantine store lives at $RECLAIM_HOME (default ~/.reclaim).

Commands

What makes it different

• Fast, byte-accurate scanner. Parallel os.scandir walk with opaque-blob pruning: 0-byte diff vs du on 290K files, ~1.57× faster — with hard-link dedup and symlink safety. It sums a node_modules as one blob instead of walking its million tiny files, so memory stays flat. (benchmarks)
• Fail-safe classification. A 3-tier safety lattice — 🟢 regenerable / 🟡 costly / 🔴 protected. Unknown ⇒ protected. A project with uncommitted or unpushed git work is never touched; secrets, databases, and data dirs are hard-protected.
• Reversible, crash-safe removal. Nothing is ever rm'd. Items move to a quarantine store guarded by a write-ahead journal; undo restores byte-identically; a crash mid-apply is rolled back at next startup; cross-filesystem moves copy-verify-delete.
• A grounded AI agent — not a chat wrapper. The model can only read facts and propose a plan; every removal still passes the same deterministic Safety Gate and your confirmation. It is architecturally incapable of an unsafe action. Bring your own provider — Claude (default), OpenRouter, OpenAI, any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, or a fully-local Ollama.
• Yours to tune. An optional ~/.reclaim/config.toml teaches Reclaim custom reclaimable units and custom protections — and protections always win.

How it works

scan ──▶ classify ──▶ plan ──▶ Safety Gate ──▶ quarantine (journaled) ──▶ undo / purge
 │           │          │          │                    │
 os.scandir  3-tier    goal→      re-checks git &    write-ahead journal;
 + pruning   lattice   ranked     protections at     crash-recovered at
             (I2)      units      apply time (I6)    startup; byte-exact undo

Every mutation funnels through one Safety Gate that re-reads the world at apply time (TOCTOU defense) — a stale plan or a hallucinating agent cannot widen its privileges past it. The load-bearing safety invariants are test-encoded:

• never reclaims 🔴 / uncommitted / unpushed work;
• undo restores byte-identically;
• apply is atomic — a mid-apply failure rolls back fully, a crash is repaired at startup;
• unknown ⇒ protected;
• user protections win over everything and are re-checked at apply time.

243 hermetic tests (injected clock/id-gen/git/LLM-client; isolated store) run on a macOS + Linux × Python 3.10/3.12 CI matrix. The platform/ layer also runs on Windows, but its byte-accounting is approximate and unverified there, so Windows is best-effort and not a CI gate — the benchmark numbers above are measured on macOS/APFS.

Documentation

• ARCHITECTURE.md — the full system architecture, workflows, and the load-bearing design decisions.
• docs/ — vision · differentiation · product design · technical depth · AI agent design · roadmap · benchmarks.
• docs/config-reference.md — the optional config file.
• docs/windows-testing-guide.md — running on Windows (best-effort; not covered by CI).
• CHANGELOG.md.

Status

Phases 0–3 are complete. The deterministic engine (0–1), the grounded AI agent (2), and the full ambient layer — config file, trends/history, disk watcher, live dashboard, and packaging (3a–3e) — all ship today. See the roadmap.

License

MIT © 2026 Anurag Chaubey