Prepare overnight code-maintenance PRs

Why use this

1. Maintenance work can be appealing precisely because it seems routine, yet supposedly dead code may support an uncommon configuration and a smaller bundle may change application behavior. Unattended editing also risks accumulating broad changes that nobody can review efficiently.

2. A maintenance proposal queue could constrain each candidate to a clear rationale, affected area and required evidence. Maintainers could choose focused changes for later authorized work instead of receiving a large cleanup whose benefit and regression risk are hard to separate.

Why an agent / simpler alternative

Useful judgment

Spot maintenance candidates and explain why a removal or optimization needs evidence beyond superficial code appearance.

Simpler alternative

Use scheduled dependency reports, linters and bundle dashboards when the maintenance criteria are deterministic.

Unsuitable when

The process lacks bounded scope, compute limits or a human reviewer for resulting changes.

Proposed inputs

1. Name

   Maintenance candidate sample

   Owner

   Maintainer

   Minimum scope

   Selected code descriptions, warnings and baseline metric definitions

   Quality check

   Separate suspected dead code from verified unused paths.

2. Name

   Work boundary

   Owner

   Repository owner

   Minimum scope

   Allowed directories, change types and resource cap

   Quality check

   Identify prohibited interfaces and unrelated refactors.

Access and setup — proposed or unknown

Proposed minimum

1. Offline candidate descriptions and a private maintenance-plan register.

Compatibility unknowns

1. Unknown: current runtime, code indexing, benchmark reliability and pull-request integration.

External actions requiring approval

1. Scheduled editing, compute allocation, repository publication and any merge or release.

Expected deliverable and review checks

Proposed artifact

Small maintenance proposals with rationale, preservation requirements and proposed regression evidence.

Critical checks

1. Each proposal has a narrow reviewable scope and a defined baseline.

2. Performance improvement remains a hypothesis until comparable measurements exist.

Missing output evidence

No new workflow run or output inspection was performed for this overlay; use the canonical source-outcome references.

Failure signals and proposed responses

1. Signal

   An unused-looking branch is enabled only in a rare configuration.

   Why it matters

   Cleanup may remove supported behavior.

   Proposed response

   Keep it until the maintainer verifies configuration coverage and intended retirement.

2. Signal

   One proposal combines formatting, dependency and performance changes.

   Why it matters

   Reviewers cannot isolate the cause of regressions.

   Proposed response

   Split the work into independently reviewable proposals with separate evidence needs.

Effort and cost — unknown

Setup work

1. Define allowed maintenance categories and baseline evidence.

Ongoing review

1. Triage proposals and inspect later authorized regression results.

Unknowns

1. Unknown: compute use, review backlog and actual maintenance benefit.

First check — proposed, unexecuted

Status

proposed_unexecuted

Synthetic fixture

A fictional queue includes a rare-config branch and a cleanup mixing three unrelated change types.

Acceptance checks

1. Retain the uncertain branch.

2. Split the mixed proposal without claiming improved performance.

Stop conditions

1. Repository edits, scheduled jobs, benchmarks or pull-request creation is required.

Limits

1. This proposed queue is not an overnight run; no code-quality or performance improvement is independently demonstrated.