growing-docs

A documentation-maintenance process for deciding when an existing documentation set needs one more focused document.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to distinguish missing documentation from incorrect documentation, log repeated demand, and add the smallest document or runbook that addresses the gap.
Why use it?
It captures recurring questions, missing facts, onboarding problems, and incidents so the same information does not have to be rediscovered.

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/aj604/toolshed/growing-docs
Any agent
npx skills add aj604/toolshed --skill growing-docs
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/aj604/toolshed

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 140 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,989 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 $0.00140 $0.01989
Opus 5 $0.00070 $0.00994
Sonnet 5 $0.00028 $0.00398
Haiku 4.5 $0.00014 $0.00199

Measured 2d ago against content hash ec400a033e41, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

growing-docs 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.

plugins/doc-lifecycle/skills/growing-docs/SKILL.md · 145 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 145 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Growing Docs

Overview

A demand signal — not a sense of completeness — is what earns a new doc. bootstrapping-docs creates the smallest high-leverage doc set and deliberately stops; this skill is the other half of that bargain. When reality asks for more — the same fact re-derived, an incident with no runbook — the doc set grows by exactly the artifact that absorbs the signal, and no further.

Route first: gap or drift?

What you found Owner
An existing doc line is now false detecting-doc-drift → fixing-docs
The fact is simply absent — no doc line contradicts reality this skill

Drift tooling audits claims that exist; a pure gap has nothing to flag. Do not wait for a drift report to legitimize growth — it never will.

The second-rediscovery rule

The first time a fact is asked for or derived the hard way, answering is fine — but the exemption costs one logged line: add - seen: <date> <one-line occurrence> under the matching ## Deferred item in docs/doc-scope.md (create the item if absent). The second rediscovery is usually a different session or a different person — without the log, nobody can recognize a second occurrence as the second, and this rule never fires. The second time, it has earned a doc — write it where the reader would have looked first (the doc they opened, the section they scanned, the file they read). This is the positive twin of writing-docs Rule 5: "cheaply inferable" is an empirical claim, and a second hard derivation falsifies it.

Name the signal before writing ("second teammate this week hit exit 3", "third session re-deriving the migrate order"). If you cannot name one, you are completeness-chasing — stop.

Signal → smallest artifact

One signal → one smallest artifact. bootstrapping-docs' STOP list (route catalogs, signature lists, directory trees) still binds — a demand signal is not a license to catalogue.

Signal Smallest artifact that absorbs it
Fact re-explained / re-derived CLAUDE.md gotcha, README section, or reference entry — whichever the reader would consult first (always-loaded placement must clear writing-docs' router rule)
Incident with no runbook runbook (writing-docs' runbooks.md)
Onboarding pain deepen README setup — or a narrative walkthrough (template below)
Recurring "why is it like this?" marked+anchored rationale section — or an ADR (template below)
Unit became load-bearing / repo grew multi-unit docs/reference/ per bootstrapping-docs' repo-shape.md

Read the full file on GitHub · 145 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 · 145 lines · 140 tokens per session scan A ec400a033e41

Subscribe to this mod's changes

growing-docs is a skill published in the GitHub repository aj604/toolshed (2 stars, last pushed 26d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 140 tokens to every session and 1,989 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.

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