bd delete <id> — delete beads and clean up the references pointing at them. Three bulk siblings share the page: bd prune (“permanently delete closed non-ephemeral beads” to reclaim space and shrink exports), bd purge (delete closed ephemeral beads — the wisp reaper), and bd admin cleanup (delete closed issues to reduce database size).
Deletion needs a whole family here for a reason unique to this layer: a store that several agents append to for months grows without bound, and every byte of it is in the context an agent might pull. Beads is the only tool in this wiki that treats forgetting as a feature rather than an omission — --ephemeral beads and wisps are born deletable (beads-mol), bd purge collects them, and semantic compaction summarizes the rest (beads-compact).
The distinction between the three is the ephemerality flag, and it is worth keeping straight: prune removes durable closed work (irreversible history loss), purge removes work that was never meant to persist (routine hygiene).
Maps to no canonical SDLC stage.
See Also
- beads-compact — the alternative to deleting: summarize and keep.
- beads-mol — wisps, the ephemeral lifecycle
purgeserves. - beads-backup — take one before pruning.