A session retention policy is just a decision about what stays useful, what stays archived, and what should disappear once the work is done.
That sounds administrative, but it becomes practical quickly. Claude Code and Codex sessions can accumulate prompts, transcripts, branches, worktrees, and review notes faster than a team expects. Without a policy, the active surface fills up with sessions that no longer need attention.
Junction's Free plan includes one saved daemon connection and two active or open chats. Core removes those limits. Either way, a retention policy keeps the control surface readable.
What A Retention Policy Actually Covers
A useful policy should answer four separate questions:
- How long should an active session remain visible?
- What belongs in the archive after the work is complete?
- When should a branch or worktree be cleaned up?
- What can be deleted without losing useful history?
If those questions are bundled together, people start making cleanup decisions by feel. That is when the wrong things disappear and the wrong things stay forever.
Separate Active From Historical
The first rule is simple: active work stays visible, historical work does not.
Active sessions are the ones that still need:
- approval,
- review,
- a follow-up prompt,
- a test rerun,
- or a decision about whether the task is done.
Historical sessions are the ones where the work outcome is already known:
- merged,
- abandoned,
- intentionally paused,
- or converted into a note, issue, or pull request.
That distinction is the same reason Archive AI Agent Sessions Without Losing History exists. Archiving is not deletion. It is a change in visibility.
Retain The Evidence, Not Every Temporary Thought
Not everything produced during a session needs the same lifetime.
Keep:
- the original prompt,
- the important approvals,
- the final diff,
- the verification command,
- and any notes that explain why the work exists.
Consider pruning:
- repeated retries that added no new information,
- stale exploratory branches,
- duplicate notes that repeat the final outcome,
- and sessions that were never meant to become durable work.
This is where session retention and branch cleanup overlap. If a worktree produced a useful patch, the patch should survive. If a worktree was just a failed experiment, it should not occupy the same mental space as a finished change.
Use Event Boundaries To Decide When To Retain
A retention policy is easier to follow when it is tied to concrete events.
Good boundaries include:
- merged pull request,
- closed bug report,
- abandoned investigation,
- archived session,
- resolved approval request,
- or documented handoff.
Once one of those boundaries happens, the question changes from "Should this stay active?" to "What history is worth keeping?"
That makes the policy much easier to apply in Junction because the session state, transcript, branch, and diff are all visible in one place.
A Reasonable Policy Shape
Every team can tune this differently, but a workable starting point looks like this:
- Keep active sessions visible until the work is reviewed.
- Archive completed sessions as soon as the branch or PR is no longer active.
- Keep a compact summary of the outcome and verification.
- Clean up abandoned worktrees once the useful patch has been discarded or merged.
- Delete only the things that no longer help you understand the history of the change.
That is not a strict retention schedule. It is a lifecycle rule.
If you want a time-based rule, make it explicit and small. For example, you might keep active sessions for the current work week, archived sessions for a longer review window, and branch cleanup tied to merge or abandonment rather than an arbitrary date. The exact numbers matter less than the consistency.
What To Keep In The Summary
When you archive or retain a session, keep a compact note with:
Outcome:
- Fixed pricing page empty state copy.
Verification:
- Site test passed.
Branch:
- feature/pricing-empty-state
Follow-up:
- None.That small summary is usually more valuable than the full scrollback if the goal is to understand what happened months later.
Why Retention Matters For Mobile And Multi-Daemon Work
Retention gets more important when you are not sitting in front of the same machine all day.
If you move between laptop, desktop, and phone, you need to know which sessions still matter and which ones are historical. Otherwise, the same open chat can sit in multiple places waiting for attention that no longer belongs to it.
That is one reason Junction's multi-daemon control surface is useful. It lets you see active work across machines, which makes it much easier to decide what should remain visible and what should move to history.
What Not To Do
Do not treat every session like a permanent record.
Do not delete the transcript before you know whether the diff is worth keeping.
Do not keep old work active just because you are afraid to archive it.
Do not use retention to hide a branch that still needs review.
The point is to reduce clutter without losing evidence.
Where Junction Fits
Junction already separates the moving pieces that make retention manageable: local execution, archived session history, diff review, and visible agent state. That means you can build a retention policy around work status instead of inventing one around raw text files.
If your current workflow is already filling the active list, start with the Junction setup guide and compare pricing once you know whether the Free plan's single saved daemon and two open chats are enough for your history and retention habits.