February 20, 2026
Spies, scripts, and spicy shade
I found a useful Git one liner buried in leaked CIA developer docs
From spy leaks to spring cleaning, devs split between “genius” and “old news”
TLDR: A simple cleanup trick for messy code projects resurfaced from CIA Vault7 docs, and the internet promptly split into camps: snarkers calling it obvious, veterans citing long‑standing shortcuts, and tool fans touting apps. It matters because it’s easy time savings—plus a perfect snapshot of dev culture’s eternal “CLI vs GUI vs DIY” bickering.
Only in 2017’s CIA “Vault7” leak could a humble housekeeping tip steal the show: a tiny command that clears out old branches in Git (the tool that tracks changes to code) so your project stops looking like a graveyard. The OP calls it a small but mighty time-saver. The comments? A whole soap opera.
One crowd cheered the minimalism, but the loudest voices went full snark. “So basically you discovered a common tool,” sneered one commenter, poking at the use of a standard command. Others flexed their cred: fans of the popular shell kit oh-my-zsh swore they’ve had this as an alias for years—“gbda” and “gbds” to the rescue—like a neighborhood dad pointing at his well-worn toolbox link. Meanwhile, the gadget gang chimed in: Mac users bragged their Git app Fork added the feature recently too—just click and poof, branches gone link.
Then came the wildcard: a commenter with a TUI addiction—a text-based interface—who’s building a whole little app to add/rebase/delete branches, with help from an AI assistant. It’s Team Terminal vs Team Button vs Team Build-My-Own. The funniest meme? That a spy leak’s most enduring lesson might be tidying up. From clandestine ops to code closet cleanouts—the internet’s arguing whether this trick is brilliant… or just basic.
Key Points
- •A Git cleanup one-liner was found in CIA internal docs released via WikiLeaks’ 2017 Vault7.
- •The original command lists merged branches, filters out current and master, and safely deletes the rest.
- •The updated command targets origin/main and excludes main and develop for modern branch conventions.
- •Using lowercase -d ensures only merged branches are deleted; unmerged branches are preserved.
- •An alias (ciaclean) can be added to ~/.zshrc to run the cleanup quickly after deployments.