Lived this many times. the worst part about these freezes is what happens right before the freeze - everyone will rush to push their changes prior to cutoff, which is exactly when you get the sloppiest commits. and then after the freeze lifts you get a flood of piled up changes all at once. Smaller, continuous deploys with a good rollback are way less risky than big batched releases after a freeze.
Nice approach. Confidence scoring on what's the safe one to delete is smart, and that's the hardest part of any cleanup tool. How are you handling false positives?
I've been thinking about similar confidence scoring in a different domain (security) and the calibration is really tricky when the cost of getting it wrong is high.
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