Keep progress files lean — archive completed phases without losing history.
Agent Skills compatible — works with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Windsurf, and other adopters.
Progress files grow indefinitely. After a few completed phases, they balloon to 400+ lines of historical detail that no one reads — but new sessions must parse all of it to find the current state. Manually trimming risks losing decisions that affect open work.
- Auto-detects archive location — probes
docs/archive/,_archive/,backstage/tracks/,.claude/archive/in order, adapts to your project's convention - Verbatim archival — completed sections are moved as-is, never summarized or rewritten
- Dependency-aware compression — keeps context that open tasks depend on, only archives truly completed work
- Stub template — replaces archived sections with a compact summary pointing to the archive file
- Post-archive verification — checks that the main file reads coherently, has no dangling references, and all incomplete tasks retain full context
"archive progress" — detect completed phases, move to archive, compress main file
"compress progress" — same as above
"clean up progress" — same as above
Also activates automatically when a progress file exceeds ~200 lines or a phase is marked complete.
The skill activates on any progress/tracking markdown file. It:
- Detects the project's archive directory (or creates one)
- Identifies sections marked as complete (✅,
[x], "completed", etc.) - Creates an archive file with full verbatim text
- Replaces archived sections in the main file with compressed stubs
- Verifies the result
Example
User: "archive the completed phases in PROGRESS.md"
progress-archive will:
- Find
backstage/tracks/as the archive location- Extract Phase 1 and Phase 2 prep (both marked ✅)
- Write
tracks/progress-phase1-and-phase2-prep-2026-03-30.md- Replace those sections with stubs containing summary + carried-forward decisions
- Verify PROGRESS.md dropped from 510 → 167 lines
npx skills add motiful/progress-archiveManual registration (clone + symlink):
git clone https://github.com/motiful/progress-archive ~/skills/progress-archive
# Register only in roots you actually use.
ln -sfn ~/skills/progress-archive ~/.claude/skills/progress-archive # Claude Code
ln -sfn ~/skills/progress-archive ~/.agents/skills/progress-archive # CodexSKILL.md — Skill definition with EP, stub template, and rules
LICENSE — MIT
MIT — See LICENSE for details.
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