Use when a repo has no doc set yet (or a bare one) and you need to create the baseline from scratch — "document this project" / "add docs" / "set up documentation" — producing the smallest high-leverage doc set and deliberately stopping, instead of cataloguing everything. This is the whole-repo…
Use when auditing documentation for low-value content — redundant, verbose, duplicated, or past its useful form — proposing pruning/condensing/distillation, and whenever bloat analysis runs programmatically (nightly sweep, PR gate, or a chunk-executor invocation handed its chunk slice) and must emit a structured…
Use when auditing documentation against the code it describes, checking whether a README/CLAUDE.md/runbook is still accurate, or finding which doc passages a code change invalidates — and whenever drift detection is invoked programmatically (by a PR check or nightly sync) and must emit a structured, parseable result.
Use when landing fixes from a doc-lifecycle audit report — applying approved drift records (STALE, UNVERIFIABLE) or bloat records (CUT, CONDENSE, EXTRACT-AND-MOVE, MERGE-DOC, RETIRE-DOC, DISTILL) to the documentation, and whenever tempted to hand-edit a document because a record, a record-ID list, an issue comment, or…
Use when a repo already has baseline docs but a demand signal says they are no longer enough — the same question answered twice, a fact re-derived the hard way across sessions, an incident with no runbook, onboarding pain, a recurring "why is it like this?", someone asking "should we document X?", or a…
Use when wiring a repo for automated/unattended documentation audit — "set up doc sync", "automate drift detection", "schedule nightly doc checks", "keep docs in sync automatically" — installs the doc-lifecycle GitHub Actions (scheduled read-only drift and bloat audits, an optional policy apply lane, a manual apply…
Use when writing or editing a documentation file whose job is to track the repo — README, runbook, CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md, reference (including the claim-style docs/reference/architecture.md that bootstrapping-docs prescribes), or agent-facing context pack — including converting human or marketing docs into dense…