Empty the Downloads folder that's become a junk drawer — the four-bucket pass (file, delete, action, quarantine), the age-based bulk rules that make 2,000 items tractable, and the tiny habit that keeps it empty. Use when asked clean up my downloads folder, 2000 files in downloads help, what's safe to delete here, or stop my downloads from piling up. Produces the bucket pass with bulk rules, the safe-delete classes, the keeper-filing routes, and the weekly sweep habit.
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Use downloads-triage to create a bulk-first triage plan for [Downloads folder] with [item count and oldest-file age] and [filing destinations], identifying known treasures and presenting delete, file, action, and dated-quarantine recommendations; do not delete or move anything without my explicit confirmation.
Required inputs
[Downloads folder]
[item count and oldest-file age]
[filing destinations]
User-approved starter prompt based on a pinned source version; check current skill requirements before running. Task evidence ↗
SKILL.md
name: downloads-triagedescription: "Empty the Downloads folder that's become a junk drawer — the four-bucket pass (file, delete, action, quarantine), the age-based bulk rules that make 2,000 items tractable, and the tiny habit that keeps it empty. Use when asked clean up my downloads folder, 2000 files in downloads help, what's safe to delete here, or stop my downloads from piling up. Produces the bucket pass with bulk rules, the safe-delete classes, the keeper-filing routes, and the weekly sweep habit."
Downloads Triage Skill
The Downloads folder is where files land, not where they live — but without a triage habit it becomes the household junk drawer: installers from 2023, seventeen copies of the same logo, that PDF you needed once. The rescue is bulk-first: age and type rules dispose of 80% without item-by-item decisions ("installers older than a month: delete all"), the keepers get filed by the folder rules, and a ten-minute weekly sweep keeps the count near zero forever.
What This Skill Produces
The bulk rules — age × type classes that clear most of the pile in a few decisions
The four buckets — delete / file (with destinations) / action (it's really a task) / quarantine (unsure, dated, auto-expiring)
The safe-delete classes — what's always safe (installers, re-downloadables) and the two check-first classes
The sweep habit — the weekly ten-minute pass, plus the browser setting that helps
Required Inputs
Ask for these if not provided:
The scale and vintage — item count and oldest file; a 200-item month and a 4,000-item three-years get different opening moves
The filing destinations — where keepers go (the folder-structure-designer structure if one exists; the _inbox if not)
Known treasures — anything important currently living in Downloads (tax documents in the junk drawer is common and worth asking about explicitly)
Framework: The Bulk-First Rules
Sort by type, sweep by class: installers/DMGs/MSIs older than 30 days → delete all (re-downloadable by definition) · zips already extracted → delete · duplicate-numbered files (logo(3).png) → keep highest, delete rest · screenshots older than 90 days → near-always deletable, one scroll-through first. Four decisions, half the pile.
Re-downloadable = deletable: anything fetchable again (statements from the bank portal, PDFs from live links, installers) carries no storage obligation — the source is the backup. The keeper test is "would losing this cost anything," not "might I want it."
The two check-first classes: documents you created/edited (they may exist only here — file them), and anything money/legal/tax-shaped (file to their real home now; the junk drawer is where subpoenaed documents go missing).
Quarantine ends the unsure-paralysis: the genuinely uncertain go to _quarantine-2026-07/ — dated, out of the way, deleted whole when the date is 90 days old and nothing was fetched from it. Deferred deletion with an expiry beats both agonizing and hoarding.
The habit is the fix: weekly ten-minute sweep (the bulk rules make it fast), downloads-ask-where-to-save turned on in the browser for documents (files land filed), and the empty-ish Downloads becomes self-maintaining — a full junk drawer attracts junk; an empty one shames it.