Evidence-backed documentation
A claim is documentation only when it carries the means to check it. This skill is the standard and the map: ten canons, and where each is defined, enforced and seeded.
It is a navigator, not a second copy. Every law below has exactly one home — that is
canon 3, and a navigator that restated the doctrine would break the rule it is indexing.
The full statement of each canon, its rationale and its enforcement live in
documentation.md → The canons.
The ten canons
- A claim carries its address —
file:line, a command with its output, a test name; a lesson names its commit. - Numbers are computed, never restated.
- Every fact has exactly one home — others link, never restate.
- A reference resolves from where the document is read — not from where it lives.
- Green nobody watched turn red is not evidence.
- A check proves its scope and nothing beyond it.
- Silence is not a pass — ask what a mechanism prints when it did not look.
- An estimate is never announced as a measurement — a rule states its evidence condition.
- What was not checked is printed beside what was.
- The document ships in the change that made it true — and a correction is appended, never written over.
They are epistemic: what makes a claim documentation. The operational layer — what to
do at a given trigger, with a check and an exit criterion — is
learned.md. When the two seem to say the same
thing, the canon is the why and the rule is the how.
Where next
| You are about to… | Read | Because |
|---|---|---|
| set a project's documentation up from nothing | documentation.md → The inventory | four questions answered before the first line of work |
| record a decision so it survives its author | Registers and ids + templates/decisions.md | append-only ids, edge markers, one decision home |
| change something and not orphan the docs | The Doc Loop + The propagation matrix | which documents a change owes, starting with the meta-row |
| decide where a fact belongs | Single source of truth | two homes disagree the day one of them is updated |
| build a check that cannot lie | gates.md | three axes, the enforcement ladder, progressive arming, probing |
| trust a mechanism that reports success | gates.md → False success | the failure that removes the reason to look |
| wire a check into the agent's own tooling | hooks.md | the hook contract, and why a crashed guard allows the action |
| audit documentation a project already has | setup.md | seven passes, cheapest first, output is a fix plan |
| carry a lesson to the next run | retrospective.md | stamp first (the cold trigger reads it), then prune to a cap of ten; every lesson names its commit |
| seed a gate into a host project | templates/docgate.sh | it seeds green: dormant where there is no input yet |
| claim that an agent behaves | tdd.md → When the thing under test is an agent — named rather than linked, because this navigator's out-of-directory links break wherever a packager ships this skill alone | the address is a trace id and the assertion that ran (canon 1); a judge nobody watched disagree is a green nobody watched turn red (canon 5) |
| take a whole change through to acceptance | task-pipeline | this skill is the standard; that one is how a change reaches the repository |
When this applies
The boundary is "it will be read as true." A decision record, a README, an acceptance report, a runbook, a changelog for users, an audit finding, a claim that something was verified.
Not through this skill: a draft, thinking out loud, an answer in chat, a commit
message, a code comment. Demanding a file:line for "let me check that" is the fastest
way to teach an agent to route around the rule where it actually protects something.
Refusal phrase — "без доков" / "on my word". It works on a task that would otherwise pass through here: do it directly and say out loud that the claim is unbacked, rather than presenting an estimate as a measurement (canon 8).
The one test
Before a document ships, read it for the sentence that would embarrass you if someone asked "how do you know?" — and either give that sentence its address, or delete it. Everything above is that question, made mechanical.