Discovery AI · session record · 26 August 2026

What I deleted, and why nothing is lost

You approved a run of clean-up operations without a clear picture of what they touched. Here is the picture — plus the check you can run yourself, and a way to read my future requests in about three seconds.

The answer, before anything else

Nothing you approved destroyed any work. Every single thing is still recoverable right now.

Of the four things that happened, three were structurally incapable of losing work — they removed labels and folders, never content. Exactly one could have lost something real. I spotted it, archived it first, and it is sitting safe on GitHub under a tag.

The bit that makes all of this make sense

Almost all the fear here comes from one confusion: git branches are not containers. They do not hold your work. Once that clicks, most of these deletions stop being scary.

Commits are the actual work — permanent snapshots of every file. Think of them as pages in a bound book. This is the treasure.

Branches are sticky notes stuck on a page, with a name written on them. That is all they are. Peeling off a sticky note does not tear out the page.

Worktrees are extra desks, each with a photocopy of the book open at some page, so several people can work at once. Clearing a desk does not touch the book.

So the one question that actually decides whether a deletion is dangerous is:

“After this, can anything still reach that work?”

If yes → deleting the label is housekeeping. If no → the pages become unreachable, and git eventually shreds them. That is the only case that needs care, and today it applied to exactly one thing.

Every deletion, itemised

What went	What it actually was	Work lost?	Why not
4 worktrees bouman, euler, hawking, rubin	Four extra desks — folders with a checked-out copy of the files	NO	I checked all four for unsaved changes first. All were spotless. Removing a desk cannot touch the book.
4 branches the same four names	Four sticky notes pointing at commits that were already merged into main	NO	Their commits sit on `main` right now. I also used `branch -d`, which physically refuses to delete anything unmerged — the safety catch was on.
v2-payment-gate	The only sticky note on 13 commits nothing else could reach	NO — but this was the real one	I tagged the work first, pushed the tag to GitHub, and only then deleted the branch. Full story below.
The branch switch wip/btws → main	Not a deletion at all — swapping which page your desk is open at	NO	The old branch still exists. Your two untracked files survived untouched. It just brought that folder from 0.6.16 up to 0.6.19.

The one that genuinely mattered

v2-payment-gate was the only real risk in the whole session, and it is worth understanding because it is exactly the shape of thing that could bite you one day.

It held 13 commits of the old v0.2 payment-gate work. Unlike the other four branches, that work had never been merged anywhere. No other branch, no tag, nothing on main could reach it. It was the last sticky note on those pages. Delete it, and GitHub would eventually garbage-collect all 13 commits for good.

So before deleting I made a tag — a sticky note that is meant to be permanent — and pushed it to GitHub. The branch is gone from your branch list, which is what you wanted, but the work is still anchored:

archive/v2-payment-gate  →  3112113  (on GitHub)
13 commits still reachable from that tag ✓

This is why I checked before acting rather than just running the delete. You said “delete v2-payment-gate” and I did — but I made it recoverable on the way past, because it was the sole copy.

While we are here — what I changed on the live site

Deletions were only half the session. The other half was a customer-facing bug fix, all of it backed up:

Deployed Discovery AI 0.6.19 to buildtheweb.site — three files, each with a dated .bak- copy sitting beside it on the server
Set four new Visitor Contact settings (team name, hello@elmspark.com, contact URL, “one working day”) — the whole settings row was saved to /root/Discovery_AI-option.bak-pre0619-20260826.txt first
Every deployed file was checksum-matched against what is on main, so the code you can read is exactly the code that is running

The bug: a prospect asked how to reach ElmsPark and the assistant replied with a literal unfilled placeholder — [ElmsPark contact details] — then admitted it had none. That is now fixed and probed live.

How to read my requests in three seconds

From here on I will label anything destructive with one of these. You only ever need to slow down on red.

Label	Means	Examples
SAFE	Structurally cannot lose work. Undo is trivial.	Removing worktrees · deleting merged branches · switching branches · editing files that are committed
REVERSIBLE	Changes something real, but I have taken a backup first and can put it back.	Deploying to a live site · changing settings in a database · overwriting a config
SOLE COPY	This is the last copy of something. Once gone, gone. Read this one properly.	Deleting an unmerged branch · `branch -D` · force-push · deleting database rows · emptying a trash

And two questions you can always throw back at me

“Is this the only copy?” — the single question that separates housekeeping from real loss. I should be able to answer with evidence, not a reassurance.

“How do I undo this?” — if I cannot give you a concrete command or a backup path, that is the signal to stop and think, not to approve.

You were right to be uneasy, by the way. Approving a run of deletions without a model of what they touch is a genuinely bad position to be in, even when — as here — the answers all happen to come back clean.

Undo commands, if you ever want them

Bring back the archived payment-gate branch:

git -C ~/Developer/elmspark/plugins/discovery-ai \
  checkout -b v2-payment-gate archive/v2-payment-gate

Recreate any of the four deleted branches (their commits are on main):

git -C ~/Developer/elmspark/plugins/discovery-ai branch claude/focused-euler-856d3f       06b3a33
git -C ~/Developer/elmspark/plugins/discovery-ai branch claude/hopeful-hawking-daf5ca     9cd57fe
git -C ~/Developer/elmspark/plugins/discovery-ai branch claude/interesting-rubin-f8fb47   67087ab
git -C ~/Developer/elmspark/plugins/discovery-ai branch claude/affectionate-bouman-287cd1 f60d672

Roll the live plugin back to the previous version:

ssh ionos-ts 'D=/var/www/buildtheweb/user-content/plugins/discovery-ai
cp -p $D/plugin.php.bak-0618-pre0619-20260826 $D/plugin.php'

Check for yourself which commits nothing can reach any more:

git -C ~/Developer/elmspark/plugins/discovery-ai fsck --unreachable --no-reflogs 2>/dev/null | grep commit

Expect exactly one result: cd5bca8. I ran this before publishing, so you are not going to be blindsided by it.

It is not from any of the deletions. It is a superseded duplicate of “Declare $instances_table and $pages_table”, left behind by a rebase back on 23 August. Its twin — 3c947a7 — carries the identical change and is sitting on main right now; you can see the two property declarations at lines 35–36 of src/plugin.php.

So: one harmless ghost, predating this session, containing nothing that is not already in your live code. Nothing from today appears in that list at all.