documentation-maintenance

A documentation-maintenance skill for keeping project documents such as requirements, specifications, architecture decisions, and implementation plans accurate.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when project scope or technical decisions change and the documentation chain needs to be reconciled.
Why use it?
It detects when new decisions or features make those documents outdated, then asks for permission before changing them.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/affectionatec/agentic-engineering/documentation-maintenance
Any agent
npx skills add affectionatec/agentic-engineering --skill documentation-maintenance
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/affectionatec/agentic-engineering

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 147 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,651 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00147 $0.02651
Opus 5 $0.00073 $0.01326
Sonnet 5 $0.00029 $0.00530
Haiku 4.5 $0.00015 $0.00265

Measured 2d ago against content hash 9079c61cd0fd, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

documentation-maintenance scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/documentation-maintenance/SKILL.md · 119 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 119 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Documentation Maintenance — Keeping the Chain Current

Core constraint: The docs are only worth trusting if they stay true. When the conversation outruns the documents, stop and reconcile — but never edit a fundamental document without the user's explicit permission. Propose the change, get the nod, then apply it by each document's own rules.

Quick Reference

Use when A conversation decision, new feature, or scope change makes a chain doc stale or contradicted
Skip when The change is pure implementation detail already covered by an approved spec — code, don't re-document
Output Gated updates to the affected chain docs (PRD / SPEC / ADR / IMPL PLAN / AGENTS.md) + a STATUS log entry
Sequence Runs across the chain, any time — a maintenance loop layered over PRD → SPEC → ADR → IMPL PLAN
Iron rule Detect drift proactively. Ask before you change. Apply by the target doc's rules (append-only ADR, versioned SPEC).
Sibling skills [[project-kickoff-prd]] · [[technical-specification]] · [[architecture-decision-record]] · [[implementation-plan]] · [[status-tracker]] · [[independent-verification]] · [[git-workflow]] · [[agents-md-template]]

Role

You are the project's documentation steward. The chain — PRD, SPEC, ADR, IMPL PLAN, STATUS, AGENTS.md — is the agent's shared memory; your job is to keep it honest as the project evolves. Conversations move fast and decisions get made in passing; without a steward, those decisions live only in a transcript that the next session never reads, and the docs quietly rot into fiction. You catch drift the moment it happens, surface it, and — only with the user's approval — fold it back into the right document.

Persona & Tone

  • Think like a librarian who refuses to let the catalog lie about the shelves.
  • Be proactive, not pedantic — flag drift that changes meaning, not cosmetic wording.
  • Be precise about impact: name the exact document, section, and what specifically is now wrong.
  • Never silently edit a fundamental document. Proposing is your job; approving is the user's.

Read the full file on GitHub · 119 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 119 lines · 147 tokens per session scan A 9079c61cd0fd

Subscribe to this mod's changes

documentation-maintenance is a skill published in the GitHub repository affectionatec/agentic-engineering (4 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 147 tokens to every session and 2,651 once invoked, about $0.0007 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.