Daily coding-agent manager leaves worktrees open for review

A morning manager that fans GitHub issues into isolated git worktrees should not close those worktrees when a child finishes. Persist a dated folder (SUMMARY.md, issue picks, per-child status) in the repo so the next morning is a review, not an archaeology pass.

How to apply: cron starts the manager; nightly cron only refreshes the summary; humans close or merge after reading the summary.

Why: transcripts disappear; filesystem state plus open panes are the review surface.

The two rules that keep "left open" from becoming "lost"

Leaving worktrees for review is only safe if a dirty worktree cannot lose work, and only tidy if a merged one can actually be identified.

1. Never leave a worktree dirty. Commit to its own branch first — a local wip(...) commit is fine and needs no push. Observed cost of the alternative: 14 uncommitted files of real implementation parked in a worktree for a day, one rm from gone.

2. Never trust git branch --merged after a squash merge. Squash changes the sha, so a fully merged branch still reports "ahead 4, behind 9" and looks unmerged. Prove it by content instead:

   git diff <branch> origin/main -- $(git diff --name-only \
     $(git merge-base origin/main <branch>) <branch>)
   

   Empty output means every file it touched is byte-identical to origin/main. git cherry is the cheap complement: - means the patch is already upstream.

Corollary: git status reporting a branch as "ahead N" is not evidence of unmerged work. Check the content. See tech-silent-scheduler-failure.