Docs Cleaner

Docs Cleaner

Documentation goes wrong in recurring ways, and they need different work.

It rots. Something changed — a port, a path, a procedure, a decision — and the docs still describe the old world. The field's name for this is documentation rot or version drift: artifacts fall out of sync one at a time until people stop trusting the set.

It sprawls. The same topic accumulates three files, each partly right, none authoritative.

They trace to one root cause: a fact was written down in more places than it was defined. Everything below follows from fixing that.

Core principle (governs both modes)

Critical evaluation before deletion. Never blindly delete. Analyze each section's unique value before proposing removal. The goal is reduction without information loss.

This governs every deletion-shaped action in this skill, not just consolidation: archiving a document, dropping a derived value, and removing a cross-reference are all deletions and all owe the same analysis first. "It looked redundant" is not that analysis.

Which mode are you in?

They share the Drift Test below. When both apply, run Mode 1 first: consolidating docs that are also factually stale just produces one confidently wrong document.

A note on `CLAUDE.md` / `AGENTS.md`: both modes apply to them like any other document — govern them after a change, consolidate them when they duplicate each other. The one job that belongs elsewhere is restructuring a single oversized one — pushing low-frequency detail down into references while keeping the top level lean. That is what daymade-claude-code's claude-md-progressive-disclosurer skill is built for; prefer it when the problem is size and layering rather than truth or duplication. If it is not available, Mode 2 still handles the file — you just do the value analysis by hand.

The Drift Test (the core of both modes)

Before writing any value into a document — and when deciding whether an existing one earns its place — ask these three questions in order, and stop at the first hit:

1. Can this be computed from details already recorded here or in the authoritative source? → It is a derived value. Do not write it. Compute it when someone asks. Examples: a count ("6 sections", "N groups covered"), a total, a status summarizing rows in a table below it, "last updated on" when the log underneath already says.

When you remove one, repair the sentence rather than leaving a hole: "the four checks below" becomes "the checks below". Deleting the number and leaving dangling grammar is a different defect, not a fix.

Exception — generated navigation. A table of contents restating the headings is a derived value by this test, and hand-maintained ones should indeed go. But leave it alone when it is produced by the docs toolchain at build time, or when the platform requires the marker to render navigation: those are computed on demand, which is what question 1 asks for. Check for a generator before deleting one.

2. Not computable, but the same fact is authoritatively defined somewhere else? → It is a copy. Link to that definition. Do not restate the value.

3. Neither — it records what was true at a particular moment? → Now you may write it down. Price history rows, decision log entries, "as of 2026-03 the vendor required X" — these are the legitimate case, and deleting them destroys an audit trail.

Question 3 needs care, because every stale value was true at some moment — that is what made it stale. But note what question 3 does and does not decide.

It decides one thing: this passage is not a drift problem. It is not a derived value and not a copy, so none of the drift remedies apply to it — do not recompute it, do not link it away, do not "update" it to the current value. Whether the passage is worth keeping at all is a content-value question, and it is answered in Mode 2's value analysis with the document's owner, not here.

Three earlier drafts of this section tried to decide keep-vs-delete right here, and each one failed review. The reason is worth stating so nobody rebuilds it: every version needed the agent to know something it does not have — whether the content could be regenerated, at what cost, by whom, or whether the other copy someone believes exists actually does. A delete authorized on an unverifiable belief is the self-certifying shape this skill exists to remove, and it would be the only evidence-free deletion in the file.

So the test is just the classification:

Is this passage describing how things are now? Then a dated old value in it is a question 1 or 2 case wearing a date, and the date does not rescue it. Or is it recording what was true at a moment — a changelog line, a decision log entry, a price history row, an incident timeline, a dated measurement, a postmortem? Then it is question 3. Leave the value alone.

Apply this to the passage, not the file — where passage means the unit that would be read as one thing: the entry, the table row, the dated note, the section under one heading. A how-to guide can contain one genuinely historical block, and a changelog can carry a current-state summary at the top; a file-level verdict gets both wrong. But do not run it below the passage either — a postmortem's timeline and its root-cause section are one record, and splitting them so the timeline can be deleted as "reproducible from logs" destroys the thing whose parts they are.

Question 3 takes precedence over questions 1 and 2 for these passages, even though it is asked later. A changelog line "2026-01-04: raised the upload limit to 50 MB" does hit question 2 — the upload limit is authoritatively defined in config — and stopping there would replace it with a link and destroy the record. Question 1 does the same damage by a different route: "2026-01-04: added eu-west-3, bringing us to 12 regions" contains a count, and a count is question 1's own example — but recomputing it yields today's region count and rewrites what that day recorded. The stop-at-first-hit rule is about efficiency, not about routing history into a link or into a recomputation.

When you cannot tell whether a passage is history or current-state, ask — do not resolve it by deleting. The asymmetry is the reason: deleting a record you mistook for a current-state restatement destroys the only copy, while keeping a restatement you mistook for a record costs a few lines. If you are running unattended and cannot ask, leave the passage untouched and report it.

Linking only solves case 2. Pointing a link at a derived value is a category error: there is no single authoritative cell to point at, so the link becomes scaffolding that goes stale on its own and creates a false impression that the two places are aligned.

Why this ordering matters: the mature answer to drift in API documentation is "generate it from the source, don't hand-copy it" (OpenAPI/Swagger exist for exactly this reason). Question 1 is that same instinct applied to prose — the surest way to keep a number correct is for it not to be written down twice.

Position gives no exemption

A fact is a fact wherever it sits. All of these are body text for the purposes of the test above, and all of them are where stale values actually survive audits:

frontmatter · YAML/JSON metadata · parenthetical asides · a description column in an index table · checkbox state · introductory framing before the real content · cross-document