bd help --doc prune.
Permanently delete closed non-ephemeral beads and their associated data.
Use this to trim closed regular beads (tasks, features, bugs, chores, etc.)
that are no longer useful. The common case is a long-lived repo where
closed work has piled up and is bloating auto-export or slowing queries.
Requires —older-than or —pattern. The flag is a safety gate — without
it, a muscle-memory --force could wipe every closed bead in the repo.
Use --pattern '*' if you really do want to sweep everything closed.
Deletes: issues, dependencies, labels, events, and comments for matching beads.
Skips: pinned beads (protected), open/in-progress beads, and ephemeral beads.
Also skips closed beads whose ID appears in the description, notes, or
comments of any open / in-progress bead. This protects ADR / decision /
verification trails that downstream beads still cite. Use
—ignore-references to override (e.g., when bulk-decommissioning a
retired label across the rig).
To delete closed ephemeral beads (wisps, transient molecules) use
bd purge instead.
For full Dolt storage reclaim after deleting many rows, follow with bd flatten
so history can be collapsed and old chunks can be garbage-collected.
EXAMPLES:
bd prune —older-than 30d # Preview closed beads >30d old
bd prune —older-than 30d —force # Delete them
bd prune —older-than 90d —dry-run # Detailed preview with stats
bd prune —pattern "" —force # Delete all closed regular beads
bd prune —pattern “gm-temp-” —force # Scope to a pattern