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offboarding: export your own work before the laptop is wiped

A departing employee documented an offboarding method that uses an AI harness pointed at existing workplace connectors — GitHub, Jira, Confluence, Gmail, Drive, Calendar, Slack and the HR directory — to compile a personal work-history inventory into a single folder before the company laptop is wiped. The GitHub portion relied on the API rather than a clone, paginating merged pull requests via a GraphQL query and counting 892 merged PRs in 2024, 1,160 in 2025 and 1,436 in 2026, exporting titles, dates and line counts only while leaving diffs behind. The author drew the line at personal work history, contacts and notes, deliberately excluding source code, PR descriptions, runbook bodies, performance reviews and customer data, which remain with the company.

by read2 min views28 publishedSep 30, 2026

♠ Problem statement: what is worth taking home on the last day at work, without taking the company’s code or data?

The line I drew: my work history, my own words, my contacts, my notes. Not source code, not runbooks, not customer data. Everything else the company keeps. Metadata about my contributions is mine to remember; the artifacts are theirs.

I pointed an AI harness at the connectors I already had (GitHub, Jira, Confluence, Gmail, Drive, Calendar, Slack, the HR directory) and asked it to build an inventory. It landed in one folder:

% eza -T -L1 ~/Downloads/offboarding
offboarding
├── README.md
├── resume-highlights.md
├── merged-prs.csv
├── jira-done.jsonl
├── jira-epics.md
├── contacts.csv
├── gmail-index.md
├── emails/
├── drive-index.md
├── drive-files/
├── confluence/
├── calendar-summary.md
├── slack-export.md
├── github-insights.md
├── chrome-bookmarks-work-profile.html
└── claude-memory/

The GitHub part is pure API, no clone. Merged PRs, paginated once:

% gh api graphql --paginate -f query='query($c: String) { viewer {
    pullRequests(first: 100, states: MERGED, after: $c) {
      pageInfo { hasNextPage endCursor }
      nodes { mergedAt repository { nameWithOwner } title additions deletions }
    } } }' --jq '.data.viewer.pullRequests.nodes[]' | jq -s . > merged_prs.json
% jq -r '.[].mergedAt[:4]' merged_prs.json | sort | uniq -c
 892 2024
1160 2025
1436 2026

Titles, dates, and line counts only. That is enough to write a resume bullet later; the diffs stay behind. Same idea for Jira (assignee = currentUser() AND statusCategory = Done) and for Confluence ( creator = currentUser()).

Two things were clearly mine and would have been lost: the “working with me” email from week one, and a first-day checklist I mailed to myself. Both went into emails/ verbatim. The Slack kudos channel got the same treatment, because nobody will write a reference from memory two years from now.

The README in the folder lists what was deliberately not exported: source code, PR descriptions, runbook bodies, performance reviews. ∎

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