command-center/agent/managed-skills/docs-point-of-use-destruction/SKILL.md

name, description

name	description
docs-point-of-use-destruction	Documentation exists for point of use, not archival. Use before any dedupe/compact/verify-docs job, and whenever a census or "only copy" argument is being used to KEEP documentation: apply the purpose test and destroy obsolete measurements. Supersedes the preservation conclusions of vault-one-fact-one-owner-dedupe §3/§12.

Documentation exists for point of use

Supersedes vault-one-fact-one-owner-dedupe §3 ("port before cut") and §12 ("expect docs flat") wherever those conclude a page must be kept. Sole custody of a useless fact is still useless.

The test, before you write and again before you keep

• Would the reader, doing a real task tomorrow, act differently because of this line? No → delete it.
• Is it a measured rate (t/s, tok/s, ms, MiB-of-pool, acceptance %, a bench ladder) for a model / runtime / layout that is not running now and not being compared now? Destroy it. Not "file it in an Eras row", not "preserve it for history". AI moves faster than the vault: the number is wrong before anyone reads it, and a wrong number in a runbook gets believed.
• Keep the law the measurement taught; drop the measurement. Qualitative causal stories survive; numbers do not.
• What survives: live config and its exact numbers, procedures, failure signatures, security posture, interface contracts, rollback pointers.
• Losing information is an acceptable, usually correct outcome. Frank said so explicitly on 2026-10-19 after rejecting a PR that had preserved 53 ledgers.

Traps that lead agents to preserve junk

• A census cannot decide what to keep. port-census.py-style tools answer "where does this fact live", never "does anyone need it". "14–63 sole-record lines per page" was read as irreplaceable when the fact was obsolete. Ask usefulness, not custody.
• A census that includes the file under test proves the page is held by itself. Exclude it, print the corpus size, assert absence; treat 0 unheld on a long page as a tool bug until proven otherwise.
• "One fact, one owner" is a placement rule, not a preservation rule. It says where a surviving fact lives; it never says the fact must survive.
• A change diary (log.md) is the largest archive in most vaults (this one: 2,380 lines, ~8 % of the vault). Git holds the chronology; a causal law belongs on the page that owns the thing it governs. Retire the diary.

Execution that worked (2026-10-19, −13.7k lines)

1. Write the kill list as a reviewed artifact, one path per line, grouped by why it is dead — that list becomes the PR's argument and the trash manifest.
2. Destroy whole pages first (scripts/destroy-vault.py <list>): move to .AGENTTRASH/<date>-destruction/, then delete every reference from survivors, whole line included when the dead link was its only content. Do not compare link targets with pathlib.Path.stem — it strips real suffixes (sd.cpp).
3. Then strip numbers from what remains (scripts/axe-measurements.py): delete ledger sections (noun-LEDS the heading, nothing instructional after it), blank any table cell reporting a rate, fold Eras older than the current one into a single row pointing at git. Never touch a shape number or a Laws/Wire/Rollback section.
4. Sweep indices (generator must exclude the trash dir, drop rows whose page cell became empty), re-lint, re-check links.
5. Rewrite the governing policy in the same PR, or the next agent re-grows the vault: project AGENTS.md Documentation Policy + the global agent settings.

Report honestly, per area

docs / scripts / operator-doc separately, measured against the merge-base. The tools are a cost that must be named, not hidden inside a headline "net" number — that is what got the previous pass rejected.

Verify the repair tools themselves

One repair pass matched "line ends with a comma" and deleted the trailing comma from 660 wrapped prose lines. Restore by matching lines that are byte-identical to HEAD except for trailing punctuation (restore-punctuation.py), keep the destructive rule out of the tool, and record the incident in its docstring.