documentation-hygiene

documentation-hygiene is a skill for Claude Code from aneja5/forge-skills. It costs 48 tokens per session (1,616 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A set of rules for keeping project documentation accurate, useful, and easy to find. It covers README files, changelogs, code comments, generated documents, and the split between public and internal information.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to establish documentation standards, improve a repository's README structure, prevent documentation rot, and set changelog practices.
Why use it?
It reduces outdated instructions, duplicated comments, missing repository entry points, and releases with no record of what changed.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the forge-skills plugin — 42 skills, 36 commands, 1 hook shipped together

Good fit Use it to establish documentation standards, improve a repository's README structure, prevent documentation rot, and set changelog practices.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/aneja5/forge-skills/documentation-hygiene
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.

Any agent
npx skills add aneja5/forge-skills --skill documentation-hygiene
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/aneja5/forge-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install forge-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 42 skills, 36 commands, 1 hook.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for documentation-hygiene

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/aneja5/forge-skills/documentation-hygiene.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/aneja5/forge-skills/documentation-hygiene)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/aneja5/forge-skills/documentation-hygiene"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/aneja5/forge-skills/documentation-hygiene.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 48 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,616 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
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 5.1 $0.00048 $0.01616
Opus 5 $0.00024 $0.00808
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00323
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00162

Measured 5d ago against content hash 78ce66c38f43, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

documentation-hygiene 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 5d 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-hygiene/SKILL.md · 146 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 146 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Documentation Hygiene

Overview

Define the project's documentation contract — what gets documented, where it lives, how it stays current — before docs rot. Output is .forge/docs-policy.md: README standard per repo and subdirectory, in-code comment policy (WHY not WHAT), doc-rot prevention rules (dates, code links, generated docs), public-vs-internal doc split, and changelog discipline. Pairs with code-review-and-quality (review enforces the policy) and shipping-and-launch (CHANGELOG updated per release).

When to Use

  • A repo is older than 3 months and the README hasn't been touched since the first commit
  • Subdirectories have grown to 5+ files with no entry-point doc
  • In-code comments are mostly restating the code instead of explaining intent
  • A new contributor takes >2 hours to figure out where things live
  • A release shipped without a CHANGELOG entry
  • A doc references a system that no longer exists

When NOT to Use

  • Greenfield project, day one — README will exist; full policy can wait until week 2
  • Throwaway prototype
  • A single typo fix in one doc

Common Rationalizations

Thought Reality
"The code is self-documenting" Code shows what, not why. Two months later the original author cannot reconstruct why.
"Docs get stale anyway, why bother" Dated docs with code links rot slower than undated docs. The half-life of a comment near its code is years; far from its code, weeks.
"README is enough" README without subdirectory docs creates a treasure hunt for every new contributor.
"We'll document before launch" You won't. And if you do, the doc will be wrong because you'll write it from memory.
"Comments are noise" Comments that explain WHY are signal. Comments that restate the code are noise. The fix is to write the right comments, not to delete all comments.
"Generated docs are good enough" Generated docs answer "what does this function take" — not "when should I call it" or "what changes if I don't."

Read the full file on GitHub · 146 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. 5d ago First seen · 146 lines · 48 tokens per session scan A 78ce66c38f43

Subscribe to this mod's changes

documentation-hygiene is a skill published in the GitHub repository aneja5/forge-skills (3 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 48 tokens to every session and 1,616 once invoked, about $0.0002 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 2026-09-03.