/fix-duplicates

description: Automatically detect and resolve duplicate increments with smart conflict resolution
disable-model-invocation: true

Fix Duplicate Increments

**Intelligent conflict resolution**: Automatically detects duplicate increments and resolves conflicts by selecting the winner, merging valuable content, and cleaning up losers.

Philosophy

**Data safety first** - This command provides multiple safety layers:

• ✅ Shows resolution plan before making changes
• ✅ Dry-run mode for preview
• ✅ Merges valuable content before deletion
• ✅ Creates detailed resolution reports
• ✅ Requires confirmation unless `--force` flag

Usage

# Detect and fix all duplicates interactively
sw:fix-duplicates

# Preview what would be done (dry-run)
sw:fix-duplicates --dry-run

# Auto-fix with content merging
sw:fix-duplicates --merge

# Force fix without confirmation (use with caution!)
sw:fix-duplicates --force --merge

# Fix specific increment number
sw:fix-duplicates 0031

Options

• `<increment-number>`: Optional. Fix only duplicates of specific increment number (e.g., "31", "0031")
• `--dry-run`: Show what would be done without making changes
• `--merge`: Merge valuable content from losers to winner before deletion
• `--force`: Skip confirmation prompts (for automated scripts)
• `--strategy <name>`: Override default resolution strategy (advanced)

How It Works

Step 1: Detection

Scans `.specweave/increments/` and all special folders:

• Active increments (`.specweave/increments/NNNN-*`)
• Archive (`.specweave/increments/_archive/`)
• Abandoned (`.specweave/increments/_abandoned/`)
• Backlog (`.specweave/increments/_backlog/`)

Detects duplicates by increment number (e.g., all folders starting with `0031-`).

Step 2: Winner Selection

**Automatic prioritization algorithm**:

1. **Status priority** (highest wins):

• active = 5 points
• completed = 4 points
• paused = 3 points
• backlog = 2 points
• abandoned = 1 point

2. **Most recent activity** (tiebreaker):

• Uses `lastActivity` from metadata.json
• Falls back to directory modification time

3. **Completeness** (second tiebreaker):

• More files = more complete
• Larger total size = more complete

4. **Location preference** (final tiebreaker):

• Active folder > Paused > Archive > Abandoned

**Example**:

Increment 0031 exists in 3 locations:
  1. active/0031-external-tool-sync (status: active, activity: 2025-11-14) → WINNER
  2. archive/0031-external-tool-sync (status: completed, activity: 2025-11-12)
  3. abandoned/0031-old-attempt (status: abandoned, activity: 2025-10-01)

Winner: Location 1 (active status + most recent activity)

Step 3: Content Merging (Optional)

When `--merge` flag is enabled:

1. **Merge reports/ folder**:

• Copy all files from losers' `reports/` to winner's `reports/`
• Rename conflicting files: `REPORT.md` → `REPORT-{timestamp}.md`
• Preserves completion summaries, session notes, analysis

2. **Merge metadata.json**:

• Take union of external links (GitHub, JIRA, ADO)
• Preserve all external issue numbers
• Keep winner's primary metadata (status, dates)

3. **Create resolution report**:

• `reports/DUPLICATE-RESOLUTION-{timestamp}.md`
• Documents what was merged from where
• Lists all deleted paths

**Example merge**:

Winner: .specweave/increments/0031-external-tool-sync/
  reports/
    ├─ IMPLEMENTATION-COMPLETE.md (original)
    ├─ SESSION-NOTES-2025-11-12.md (merged from archive)
    └─ DUPLICATE-RESOLUTION-20251115-070000.md (NEW)

Loser 1: .specweave/increments/_archive/0031-external-tool-sync/
  reports/
    └─ SESSION-NOTES-2025-11-12.md → MERGED to winner

Loser 2: .specweave/increments/_abandoned/0031-old-attempt/
  (No valuable content to merge)

Step 4: Deletion

**Safety measures**:

• Shows confirmation prompt: `Delete {path}? This will permanently remove {N} files. [y/N]`
• Default answer: `N` (no deletion unless confirmed)
• `--force` flag skips prompts (for CI/automated scripts)
• Dry-run mode never deletes (shows preview only)

Examples

Example 1: Interactive Fix (Recommended)

sw:fix-duplicates

**Output**:

🔍 Scanning for duplicate increments...

Found 2 duplicates:

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Duplicate 1: Increment 0031-external-tool-status-sync
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Locations:
  1. ✓ (recommended) active/0031-external-tool-status-sync
     Status: active | Activity: 2025-11-14 | Files: 12
     Reason: Active status + most recent

  2. ✗ archive/0031-external-tool-sync
     Status: completed | Activity: 2025-11-12 | Files: 10

Resolution Plan:
  • Keep: active/0031-external-tool-status-sync
  • Delete: archive/0031-external-tool-sync

Delete archive/0031-external-tool-sync? [y/N]: y

✅ Resolved duplicate 0031
   • Kept: active/0031-external-tool-status-sync
   • Deleted: archive/0031-external-tool-sync (10 files removed)

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Summary
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Duplicates found: 2
Duplicates resolved: 2
Files deleted: 15
Space freed: 2.3 MB

📝 Resolution reports:
   • active/0031-external-tool-status-sync/reports/DUPLICATE-RESOLUTION-20251115-070000.md

Example 2: Dry-Run Preview

sw:fix-duplicates --dry-run

**Output**:

🔍 DRY RUN - No files will be deleted

Found 2 duplicates:

Duplicate 1: Increment 0031
  [DRY RUN] Would keep: active/0031-external-tool-status-sync
  [DRY RUN] Would delete: archive/0031-external-tool-sync (10 files)

Duplicate 2: Increment 0032
  [DRY RUN] Would keep: active/0032-increment-number-gap-prevention
  [DRY RUN] Would delete: active/0032-prevent-increment-number-gaps (8 files)

Summary:
  Would resolve: 2 duplicates
  Would delete: 18 files
  Would free: 2.5 MB

Run without --dry-run to proceed:
  sw:fix-duplicates --merge

Example 3: Auto-Fix with Merge