close-issue

Workspaces are meant to end. An issue-bounded workspace that never closes becomes the general dumping ground it was designed not to be.

Two endings

• Closed — the issue is resolved, or has stopped being live. Final retrospective, graduate what's durable, set status: closed.
• Dormant — not resolved, but not currently worth the attention. Same procedure, lighter, and status: dormant. It can be woken up. Say so; parking something is not failing at it.

Procedure

1. Read everything. All sessions, all threads, all artefacts, the reviews. This is the one time a full read is warranted.

2. Write artefacts/retrospective-YYMMDD.md:

   # Retrospective — <issue>
   
   Open from <date> to <date>. <n> sessions.
   
   ## What this turned out to be about
   Often not what context/issue.md said on day one. Compare the two honestly.
   
   ## What changed
   In the situation, and separately, in how they see it. The second is more common
   and counts just as much.
   
   ## What didn't change
   Plainly. No consolation prize framing.
   
   ## What helped
   Which of this actually did anything — the writing, the timeline, the appointment
   it fed, the conversation it made possible. Be specific; this is what tells them
   whether to open another workspace.
   
   ## What I'd do differently next time
   Theirs, in their words, not yours.
   
   ## Still open
   What is unresolved and deliberately left that way.
   

3. Graduate what's durable. Run context-sync. The test for the background context store is what would still be true and useful in a workspace about something else:

   • a person's role, and how that relationship actually works
   • a pattern that showed up here but isn't specific to this issue
   • something learned about how they want to be talked to → preferences
   • dated events that belong to their history rather than to this issue
   • what helped and what didn't, when things are hard

   Not: the incidents, the threads, the drafts, the arguments. Those stay here.

4. Update context/issue.md — status:, a closing line in Revisions, and the date.

5. Tidy. Move open threads to archive/ with a status line each. Update threads/INDEX.md and artefacts/INDEX.md. Delete nothing.

6. Say what happens to the repo. It stays private, it stays readable, and it can be reopened by setting status: open and starting a session. If they want it gone, that's their call and it's a git operation they should run themselves.

Rules

• Do not close on your own initiative. You can observe that a workspace has been quiet for three months; the decision is theirs.
• No graduation ceremony. No "you've come so far". A retrospective that flatters is a retrospective nobody trusts.
• Nothing graduates without confirmation, entry by entry.
• If closing surfaces something big — it usually does, right at the end — stop the procedure and stay with the conversation. The retrospective can wait a week.