compostlisted

# Compost Docs that explain code start rotting the moment the code moves. Composting is what a gardener does with rot: not landfill, and not denial -- decompose it and feed what was alive in it back to the soil. Here the soil is the codebase. A pass is complete when no agent-visible doc survives whose content an agent could rediscover by reading the code, and the savings have visibly fed the code itself. Why stale explanatory docs are worse than none: an agent loads doc and code together, and when they disagree it cannot tell which is true -- the stale essay wins just often enough to hurt, because it wears the authority of documentation. Meanwhile the doc's maintenance bill never stops arriving. This skill is a budget reallocation: the tokens spent keeping an essay in sync buy renames, types, tests, and error messages instead -- forms of explanation that cannot drift, because they are the code. ## Gate Run a pass when any of these hold: agent output cites markdown more often than source; docs and code tell different stories (or you fear they do); a wave of generated "overview" or "architecture" files just landed; context windows fill with restated implementation. Go light or stop when: - **Docs are the product.** A published user-facing docs site is a product surface with its own craft, not restatement. - **The docs belong to another team.** Produce the tagged inventory and hand it over -- deleting someone else's source of truth without sign-off is how this doctri