command-center/omp-docs/references/okf-maintenance.md

type, title, description, tags, timestamp

type	title	description	tags	timestamp
guide	OKF Bundle Maintenance	Keep your OKF knowledge bundle from rotting — change tracking, frontmatter discipline, staleness detection, and automation.	okf maintenance documentation best-practices unverified	2026-10-19

OKF Bundle Maintenance

Knowledge bundles rot. It is the nature of knowledge to attract cobwebs, much like an unvisited pantry attracts spiders that are frankly doing you a favor by reminding you it has been a while. An OKF bundle maintained by agents is no exception — files drift out of sync, frontmatter becomes decorative, and index.md turns into a ghost town where links go to die.

The core principle: if you do not track changes, you do not know when they happened. If you do not have a changelog, you are the person who finds the broken thermostat and wonders why it is set to "volcano."

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Change Tracking with log.md

Exactly one log.md per bundle, at the bundle root — okf-spec.md owns that rule and scripts/kb-lint.sh enforces it, reporting any log.md that is not the root's. The maintenance action is collapse, never coexistence: when a second log turns up (core/log.md, notes.md, a per-run diary), move its entries into the root log under their own dates, delete the file, and re-run the linter.

Format: one dated section per day, newest first; a few lines per change — what happened, and the durable lesson. It is not a file manifest.

# Bundle Change Log

## 2026-01-15 — the gate was reading the wrong files

A gate that gets an empty file list reports success. Law: a check MUST fail closed;
a silently-passing gate is worse than none, because it buys the belief of safety.
Details: [secret gate](/tools/index.md).

Rules:

• Newest entries first. Old entries at the top invert the timeline.
• What changed + the durable lesson, a few lines. Full narratives are recoverable from git (git log --follow log.md); never re-expand one in place.
• Laws and incidents, never bookkeeping. No per-file inventories, no run-by-run numbers, no transcripts. Measured numbers still have to pass the purpose test.
• Link, do not duplicate. Knowledge that outlives the entry belongs on its concept page; the entry points there.
• One dated section per day (## YYYY-MM-DD), and mention index.md whenever a file is added or removed.

Common Mistakes

• ❌ Updated ghostty.md — updated it with what, and what did it teach?
• ❌ Forgetting the entry — the change lands undocumented and the next agent rediscovers the failure the hard way.
• ❌ Starting a second log in a subdirectory — the sprawl that makes logging useless.
• ❌ Invented paths in links — the RECOMMENDED form is an absolute bundle path (/tools/index.md), resolved against the bundle root; the mistake is a path that names no file there, and that is what the linter reports.
• ❌ Re-expanding an old entry in place — the entry is a pointer; git is the transcript.

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Frontmatter Discipline

Frontmatter is the metadata layer. It is not decoration.

Required field:

• type — The concept type. The only strictly required frontmatter field.

Strongly recommended:

• description — The preview text. Without it, the file is invisible and confusing.
• tags — Use for cross-cutting concerns. Tags hold things together across categories.
• timestamp — Include for staleness detection. A file with a timestamp from 2023 is more likely stale than one from 2026.
• title — Optional but helpful.

Rules:

• ✅ Every concept file must have a description.
• ✅ Use tags liberally but consistently.
• ✅ Include timestamp on every file.
• ✅ Pick descriptive type values: reference, guide, configuration, tutorial.
• ❌ Don't use type: file or type: document — be specific.
• ❌ Never leave description blank or copy the title.

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One Thing Per File

OKF is built on the principle that a file is one concept.

Splitting criteria:

• ✅ One topic, one file. If the content can be summarized in one sentence without using "and," it belongs in one file.
• ✅ Give each file its own type.
• ✅ Keep each file between 1 and 500 lines. Under 1 = over-split. Over 500 = under-split.
• ❌ Don't create a file called misc.md — misc is a graveyard, not a category.
• ❌ Don't use # Other or # Additional Notes sections — these are taping things to the wall.

Quarantine, Not Deletion

A page is never deleted outright: it moves to .AGENTTRASH/ beside where it lived and waits for a pruning session with Frank present. The quarantine is not part of the bundle — scripts/kb-lint.sh and scripts/kb-coverage.py skip any path containing .AGENTTRASH. That exemption is deliberate: a gate that goes green only once the quarantined copy is gone is a gate that deletes history.

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Auto-Generation Strategies

Index files as living documents:

find docs/bundle-name/ -name '*.md' ! -name 'log.md' -type f | \
  sort | \
  awk '{print "- " $0}' > docs/bundle-name/index.md

Staleness detection:

# Find files older than 90 days
find docs/ -name '*.md' ! -name 'index.md' ! -name 'log.md' \
  -mtime +90 -type f -print

# Find files missing timestamp
find docs/ -name '*.md' ! -name 'index.md' ! -name 'log.md' \
  -type f -exec grep -L '^timestamp:' {} \;

# Find files missing description
find docs/ -name '*.md' ! -name 'index.md' ! -name 'log.md' \
  -type f -exec grep -L '^description:' {} \;

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Version Control Best Practices

• ✅ One logical change per commit
• ✅ Write meaningful commit messages ("Updated file" is not a commit message. It is a shrug in text form.)
• ❌ Don't commit entire bundle dumps — a commit touching 50 files is a data dump, not a change

Useful git commands:

git blame -L 1,30 docs/ghostty.md          # Who changed what and when
git log --oneline -n 10 -- docs/pi-permission-system/  # Last commits in a directory
git status --short                            # What is uncommitted

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Knowing When Something Is Stale

Signal	Threshold	Action
timestamp field older than 6 months	Auto-flag	Review and update or archive
File not modified in 12 months	Auto-flag	Assess whether still relevant
index.md count differs from file count	Always	Fix immediately
log.md has no entries for 30+ days	Context-dependent	Normal if no changes made

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Automated Gates (this bundle)

Two mechanical checkers live in scripts/; both exit non-zero on violations. Run both before committing any omp-docs/ change; tests/kb-lint.bats pins their behavior.

bash scripts/kb-lint.sh omp-docs         # OKF conformance
python3 scripts/kb-coverage.py omp-docs  # index coverage doctrine

• kb-lint — OKF v0.1 rules: non-empty type frontmatter on every non-index file, no frontmatter on index.md, resolvable wikilinks and relative links, reserved names (index.md/log.md), YYYY-MM-DD log headings.
• kb-coverage — the AGENTS.md anti-rot mechanism: every directory has an index.md, and that index links every sibling file and subdirectory.

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See Also

• OKF v0.1 Specification — The complete format specification.
• Root Index — This bundle's structure and navigation.