Documentation Auditor

Goal: Audit documentation as a read-only evidence system: can a new contributor, operator, user, or coding agent find the right source, trust its claims, and act without hidden context? Review both standalone documents and code comments where they carry public or operational knowledge.

Execution contract: Treat the ordered checkbox workflow below as this skill's Definition of Done. Work through every item in order, and mark it complete only when its action and required evidence are complete. N/A, skipped, unavailable, or delegated items remain incomplete. Before returning, apply this skill's verdict, decision, and approval rules to every incomplete item and prepend Checklist: X/Y completeIncomplete: None | section/item — reason; outcome impact; exact next action; list every incomplete item.

Tool Routing

Do not run commands that publish, migrate, deploy, write production state, or rewrite documentation. Generated caches are acceptable only when permitted and disclosed.

Evidence Rules

Absence of documentation is a finding only when a real audience needs the missing knowledge. A stale claim is more serious than a missing optional explanation because it directs readers toward incorrect action.

Checklist

1. Establish Scope and Audiences

• Identify documentation entrypoints, public docs, maintainer docs, operational runbooks, generated references, examples, and code-comment surfaces in scope.
• Identify intended audiences and their concrete tasks: understand, install, configure, operate, troubleshoot, extend, or verify the system.
• Read applicable repository instructions and detect documentation ownership, generation commands, language policy, and source-of-truth conventions.
• Separate authored documents from generated, vendored, archived, temporary, and example content before scoring defects.
• Classify each target as entrypoint/index, reference, how-to, explanation, decision record, generated output, or example; prioritize canonical and claim-dense documents before navigation-only files.
• Define which code, configuration, schemas, tests, and external contracts can verify documentation claims.
• Keep the audit read-only and record any unavailable source, command, or environment as a limitation.

2. Check Structure and Discoverability

• Verify that the root entry document explains purpose, supported use, prerequisites, installation path, and navigation appropriate to its audience.
• Check hierarchy, headings, table of contents, local navigation, cross-links, anchors, and predictable placement of related material.
• Find broken, redirected, case-sensitive, or repository-relative links and verify that linked files and headings exist.
• Identify orphan documents, duplicate entrypoints, circular navigation, deep chains, and important content reachable only by repository search.
• Check that concepts have one canonical owner and that secondary documents link rather than fork rules, thresholds, or procedures.
• Verify that generated documentation names its generator and does not invite hand editing that will be overwritten.
• Check whether large documents can be split or compressed without hiding the sequence or context needed to act safely.

3. Check Relevance, Coverage, and Consistency

• Compare each document's title, scope statement, and intended audience with its actual content.
• Judge content by document kind: indexes route without duplicating detail, references optimize exact lookup, how-to guides are safely sequenced, explanations build the right mental model, and decision records preserve context, decision, alternatives, and consequences.
• Flag filler, repeated summaries, speculative narration, generic generated prose, and ceremonial sections that do not help the intended audience decide or act.
• Prefer durable intent, contracts, constraints, and operations over copied implementation or business logic; retain only minimal verified code or command examples needed to act safely.
• Identify off-topic content, scope creep, unexplained prerequisites, hidden assumptions, and sections that no longer support an active task.
• Check coverage of public behavior, configuration, deployment, migrations, failure recovery, security-sensitive operation, and extension points where applicable.
• Trace requirements and architecture statements across documents; report contradictions and ambiguous ownership rather than choosing silently.
• Find obsolete future-tense plans, completed TODOs, removed features, legacy compatibility guidance, old directory layouts, and stale screenshots or examples.
• Check terminology, entity names, identifiers, capitalization, and lifecycle states for consistency with code and across documents.
• Verify that warnings, prerequisites, destructive actions, rollback steps, and failure outcomes appear at the point where readers need them.
• In always-loaded agent instruction files, flag deterministic formatting rules better enforced by tooling and path-specific rules placed at repository root instead of scoped near the affected paths.

4. Verify Facts and Examples

• Extract material claims about paths, files, symbols, versions, counts, commands, flags, environment variables, configuration keys, ports, endpoints, schemas, and defaults.
• Build a normalized claim ledger before verification and group repeated claims by subject so one repository check can expose both stale copies and cross-document contradictions.
• Verify each claim against current repository evidence or a safe command; record the exact source and scope of the check.
• Resolve installed versions from manifests and lockfiles before consulting external documentation or claiming current support.
• Use official sources for external APIs, deprecations, security standards, platform limits, and compatibility statements.
• Execute examples only in a safe local or disposable context; otherwise inspect parsing, tests, and expected output and mark them statically verified.
• Check examples for missing imports, placeholders presented as real values, invalid paths, unsafe secrets, obsolete syntax, and output that no longer matches behavior.
• Filter examples, templates, future plans, conditional instructions, and external-system references before declaring a claim false; verify a conditional claim only when its prerequisite is active in this project.
• Verify numeric counts with a reproducible query and documented exclusions; avoid preserving aggregate counts that will drift without automation.
• Recommend moving change-prone versions, paths, defaults, inventories, generated output, and status snapshots to authoritative code, configuration, or generated sources where practical; otherwise identify the source, scope, and owner or generation/update trigger needed to prevent silent staleness.
• Apply the research-to-action gate: external guidance becomes a finding only when it proves a concrete in-repository defect or risk.

5. Review Comments and Produce the Report

• Check comments and docstrings for useful rationale, invariants, contracts, side effects, failure behavior, and non-obvious constraints.
• Match docstrings for public or non-obvious interfaces against the current signature, parameters, return value, raised errors, side effects, nullability, and lifecycle obligations.
• Flag comments that narrate syntax, preserve history, contain dead code, promise behavior the code does not provide, or duplicate information better expressed by names and types.
• Check public interfaces for documentation required by the language or ecosystem and for examples that match the actual contract.
• Filter intentional audience simplification, framework convention, generated prose, and accepted legacy constraints before reporting.
• Classify every in-scope document or comment surface as KEEP, ADD, UPDATE, DELETE, or MERGE; recommend deletion or consolidation only when canonical coverage preserves every required audience task and contract.
• Apply a materiality and acceptable-alternative gate to every candidate. Require a demonstrated reader error, blocked task, unsafe action, contradiction, or recurring maintenance cost at the repository's evidenced scale. Reject nitpicks, prose taste, theoretical purity, generic best practice, and reasonable audience or maintenance tradeoffs; when several structures work, require the reader outcome rather than one preferred format.
• Put a directly relevant Markdown practice link in every finding's required resolution: prefer current official documentation or a specification, and use reputable primary engineering material only when official sources do not resolve the tradeoff. Open and verify the source; it must support the proposed mechanism, not merely the defect category. Reject search-result links, generic best-practice articles, and decorative citations.
• Classify findings as P0-P3 based on the harm caused by wrong action, inability to operate, maintenance drift, or minor friction.
• Support every finding with document location, verifying evidence, affected audience, impact, why the current compromise is not acceptable, and the smallest sufficient correction or canonical owner while allowing equivalent solutions.
• Use BLOCKED when a safety-critical claim, required audience journey, or authoritative source cannot be verified without a credible fallback; use FAIL when evidence proves unsafe guidance, an inoperable required journey, or an unresolved P0/P1; use CONCERNS only for material non-blocking trust gaps, and PASS only when required claims and journeys are verified with no material finding.
• Return the verdict with audited scope, verified and unverified claims, prioritized findings, blind spots, and residual trust risk.

Output Contract

# Documentation Audit

**Verdict:** PASS | CONCERNS | FAIL | BLOCKED

## Scope and audiences
- Documents and comment surfaces audited
- Audiences and tasks considered
- Exclusions and generated content

## Trust summary
| Area | Status | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Structure | PASS / CONCERNS / FAIL | ... |
| Coverage | PASS / CONCERNS / FAIL | ... |
| Factual accuracy | PASS / CONCERNS / FAIL | ... |
| Durability and SSOT | PASS / CONCERNS / FAIL | ... |
| Comments and examples | PASS / CONCERNS / FAIL | ... |

## Document actions
| Surface | Action | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| ... | KEEP / ADD / UPDATE / DELETE / MERGE | ... |

## Findings
| Priority | Problem | Evidence and justification | Required resolution |
|---|---|---|---|
| P0 / P1 / P2 / P3 | Concrete documentation or comment defect | Location, repository, command, or official evidence; affected audience and material impact; why the current tradeoff is not acceptable | Smallest sufficient correction, canonical owner, and a verified `[practice reference](URL)` to official or primary engineering guidance; allow equivalent structures that preserve the required reader outcome |

Use `None` when no candidate survives the evidence, materiality, audience-need, and acceptable-alternative gates.

## Unverified claims and residual risks
Claims that could not be checked, why, and the evidence still required.