docs-consolidate

name

docs-consolidate

description

Audit a repo's documentation for internal contradictions, stale claims, orphans and bloat after it has accumulated commits, then report findings for the user to disposition. Use when the consolidation nudge fires, or when the user asks to consolidate, audit, or spring-clean the docs. Triggers: "/docs-consolidate", "consolidate the docs", "docs audit", "have the docs drifted", "check the docs against each other". Do NOT use for updating one doc alongside a code change — that is the commit gate's job, and a single doc edit needs no audit.

Documentation consolidation

An audit, not a rewrite. It reports; you decide; only then does anything change.

Google's opendocs defines the audit archetype as inventory + analysis + recommendations, "explicitly excluding the writing or editing of docs based on those results". That separation is the point: LLM inconsistency detection is nowhere near reliable enough to edit unsupervised, and an autonomous rewrite would be confidently wrong at exactly the rate that matters.

This never blocks anything. If the user is mid-task, say what you found and let them come back to it.

--init

Adopt the trigger in this repo.

--init starts the clock; it does not audit. The audited= SHA it writes means "drift is measured from here", not "these docs were verified at this commit". Say that to the user when you run it, because the trigger will then stay silent for threshold − 1 commits over docs nobody has checked. If the repo's docs are of unknown quality, offer to run a full pass immediately after adopting.

1. Refuse if the record would be ignored. git check-ignore .docs-sync matching means the file would never reach a teammate's clone — stop and say so rather than creating a record that silently does nothing. (This is what ruled out putting it under .claude/: transcoder gitignores that directory.)

2. Write .docs-sync at the repo root:

   docs-sync: audited=<git rev-parse HEAD>
   Recorded: <ISO-8601 UTC>
   Run /docs-consolidate — do not hand-edit the audited= line.
   

   The second line says Recorded, not "Last consolidation", and both --init and a re-stamp use the same wording. At adoption no consolidation has happened, so a line claiming one would be false in the file whose entire job is to not make false claims.

3. Commit it. Then assert audited == git rev-parse HEAD~1 — the record names the commit whose tree was audited, which is the parent of the commit containing the record, because a file cannot carry the SHA of the commit that contains it.

Removing .docs-sync is the documented opt-out, and it takes effect immediately: the hooks check the working tree for existence, so a deleted record goes silent before the deletion is even committed.

--defer

Run the shipped script. Resolve it relative to this skill's own base directory — the absolute path stated when this skill was loaded — as ../../scripts/defer-consolidation.mjs:

D="<this skill's base directory>/../../scripts/defer-consolidation.mjs"
node "$D"            # defer here
node "$D" . --clear  # undo

Do not use ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}. Like CLAUDE_PLUGIN_DATA, it is set for hooks and is unset in session shells, so it silently expands to nothing and the command becomes node "/scripts/defer-consolidation.mjs" → MODULE_NOT_FOUND. The skill's base directory is the only plugin path available here.

The marker lives in .git/docs-sync-defer, deliberately not in the plugin data directory: CLAUDE_PLUGIN_DATA is not exported to session shells, so anything derived from it here would be written where the hook never looks and deferral would silently never work. .git/ is per-clone — exactly the scope of "not now" — and never committed.

Never touch .docs-sync to silence a nudge. Recording a consolidation that did not happen is the one lie this whole mechanism exists to prevent.

The pass

1. Inventory the corpus

• every README.md / CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md anywhere in the repo, plus
• all Markdown under docs/.

Record line count and last-touching commit for each.

Exclude dated, point-in-time records — any specs/plans/ADR directory: docs/superpowers/specs/, docs/superpowers/plans/, docs/plans/, docs/adr/, and their equivalents wherever this repo keeps them. These are archival by convention (ADRs are never deleted; a superseded one is supposed to disagree with current state), so auditing them generates permanent, unfixable "stale" findings. That is the fastest route to a not-useful rate that gets the whole tool switched off.

Match on what the directory holds, not on the four names above — a repo that keeps dated records somewhere else still needs them excluded, and a docs/plans/ that this list happened to miss is how a pass ends up auditing an archive. Dated filenames (YYYY-MM-DD-*) are the reliable tell. Say which directories you excluded when you report.

Exclude generated sections. transcoder's CONFIG-MATRIX in docs/STATUS.md is generated from crates/host/src/http/config_matrix.rs::MATRIX and CI-linted by crates/host/tests/config_matrix_drift_test.rs. A CI-enforced doc is ground truth, not an audit target.

2. Read the diff

git diff <audited>..HEAD — actual hunks, never --stat. A commit that inverts an authorization check inside an existing file appears in --stat as a pathname and two line counts, which tells you nothing about whether a doc still describes it correctly.

3. Read the whole corpus

Every file from step 1, in full — not a selection. Inventory metadata is not evidence, and which doc contradicts a diff is not knowable before reading it.

An ancestor-chain walk from each changed path is not sufficient: in transcoder a change under crates/host/ is contracted in docs/STATUS.md and docs/BEHAVIOUR.md, neither of which is on that path's chain. Reading only the diff plus an ancestor walk lets a pass report zero findings and re-stamp over a live contradiction.

Partial coverage never re-stamps. If the corpus is too large to read in full, do not silently sample: read the ancestor chains plus everything under docs/ plus the root entry docs, name the files that went unread, and do not re-stamp. A partial pass is a useful report and an unfinished audit.

4. Audit against four failure modes

mode	what it looks like
contradiction	two docs, or two sections, assert incompatible things
stale claim	a claim the diff falsified
orphan	documents code or behaviour that no longer exists
bloat	accreted lines no longer earning their context cost

Every finding carries file:line, the claim, the contradicting evidence, and a proposed disposition (keep / update / remove).

Deletion is a first-class outcome. Across 2,303 agent context files in 1,925 repos, growth is monotonic — median 57 words added per commit versus under 15 deleted. A controlled eval found LLM-generated context files reduce SWE-bench task success ~3% while raising cost >20%. Anthropic's own guidance is to review "periodically to remove outdated or conflicting instructions" and keep files under 200 lines because "longer files consume more context and reduce adherence". So a pass that finds nothing to remove deserves scrutiny, not relief.

5. Report — do not edit

Present findings. The user dispositions each one. Apply only what they accept.

6. Re-stamp last

Set audited= to the HEAD that was actually audited, refresh the timestamp, commit — in the same commit as the applied edits, or immediately after.

If the diff or the corpus was too large to read in full, say so and do not re-stamp. Re-stamping on unread evidence re-blesses false claims and silences the trigger for another N commits.

7. A clean pass is a success

Zero findings is a real outcome, not a miss. Re-stamp, change nothing, say so plainly.

Before committing, verify the record actually changed (git diff --quiet -- .docs-sync exits non-zero). If it did not, this pass audited the same HEAD as the last one and there is nothing to record — say so and skip the commit rather than making an empty one. Do not rely on the timestamp to force a byte change: it is second-resolution, and two passes within the same second render identically.

Intentional contradictions get a rationale, not a suppression entry

If a finding is deliberate, the fix is to write why into the doc ("this differs from X because…"). That silences future passes by giving them the reason to read, and is better documentation than a suppression list.

There is deliberately no dismissal registry. Stable finding identity across moving line numbers is its own rabbit hole, and a suppression list that grows is how a tool's not-useful rate climbs while it still looks like it is working.

Common mistakes

Mistake	Why it's wrong
Re-stamping without reading the diff	The record then asserts an audit that never happened
Re-stamping without reading the docs that could contradict it	The contradicting contract is routinely a sibling under docs/, not an ancestor
Reading --stat instead of hunks	A pathname and two line counts cannot falsify a claim
Treating the inventory as evidence about content	Line counts say nothing about what a doc asserts
Editing docs before the user dispositions findings	This is an audit; the separation is the whole design
Treating the nudge as blocking	It never blocks — the user can always carry on
Touching .docs-sync to silence a nudge	Use --defer; the record must only ever record real audits
Auditing ADRs, specs or dated plans	Archival by convention — they are meant to disagree with current state